Sometime in the 21st Century

SOMETIME IN
THE 21 st CEN¬
TURY: a book for
strangers

Sometime in the 21 st Century is © 2015 by James
Banks and licensed under a Creative Commons li¬
cense: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International. See

creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

A note on the type: the Computer Modern family was
designed by Donald Knuth. The fonts employed in
this work are Computer Modern Serif, and for the
headers, Computer Modern Sans Serif.

FOREWORD

I could never write this book now. There are elements
of this book I wish I could take back, or ideas which I
now consider errors. On the other hand, there are ele¬
ments of this book which I can only aspire to now,
which I have to approach from another angle at this
age, like trying to climb to 20,000 feet and finding out
the mountain you were climbing only goes to 15,000
feet (thus, you have to climb down and find another
mountain and keep climbing).

Because I can’t write this book now, because it be¬
longs to the past, I have chosen to leave it unedited
from its past form, except for a few low-level errors.

A reader might wish to know which things I would
take back, but in deference to my past self, I will let
him speak without using my privileged position as an
interpreter of him to make it harder for you to hear
what he has to say, given that my present self might
be wrong in ways that he is right.

As I prepare to release this book now, it strikes me
that I wouldn’t call it good, but I would call it power¬
ful, and it’s not always right, but it’s true.

I’m writing this page on 28 May 2018, and what fol¬
lows, is the original book:

DISCLAIMER

IMPLEASE READ!!!

THIS BOOK EMERGED FROM WITHIN ME AND
WAS MINIMALLY EDITED. IT HAS TURNED
OUT TO BE SOMETHING LIKE A CRAIGSLIST
MISSED CONNECTIONS AD. INTERESTINGLY
ENOUGH, THERE IS A MORE DIRECT WAY FOR
ME TO CONTACT THIS PERSON FOR WHOM IT
ADVERTISES BUT I AM CHOOSING NOT TO
USE THAT METHOD BECAUSE THIS IS A MORE
AWESOME METHOD.

BY READING THIS BOOK YOU (ESPECIALLY
BUT NOT LIMITED TO “Missed Connections Per¬
son”) WAIVE ALL RIGHTS TO INDEMNIFY OR
HOLD LIABLE THIS BOOK FOR ANY CONCLU¬
SIONS YOU DRAW HASTILY BEFORE FINISH¬
ING THE BOOK. IT IS STRONGLY ADVISED
THAT YOU DO NOT JUMP TO ANY
HASTY CONCLUSIONS. THIS BOOK IS UN¬
DER NO LEGAL OBLIGATION TO BE USEFUL
FOR ANY PURPOSE.

DEDICATION

This book is written for and addressed to all strangers
who might come across this book, but is especially in¬
tended for a particular person who was a complete
stranger to me but then was not, completely, a
stranger. She is designated as “S.” in this book.

I don’t know if this book is any good, but it’s some¬
thing that at least she may benefit from reading, in
order to know, or at least begin to know (through the
lens of fiction and sometimes that of plain speech), the
truth of how I think and feel, and where I am coming
from and where I am going.

2 September 2015

“As a result of the studies and tests of modern science
it has come to be recognized that phosphorus is a nec¬
essary element in human, in animal and in plant nu¬
trition. The phosphorus content of our land, following
generations of cultivation, has greatly diminished. It
needs replenishing. The necessity for wider use of
phosphates and the conservation of our supplies of
phosphates for future generations is, therefore, a mat¬
ter of great public concern. We cannot place our agri¬
culture upon a permanent basis unless we give it
heed.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt 1

Message to Congress on Phosphates for Soil Fertility,
given May 20, 1938

METRIC EQUIVALENTS

90 degrees Fahrenheit = 32 degrees Celsius

mile —1.6 km
16 miles = 25.75 km
26.2 miles = 42.2 km
32 miles = 51.5 km
half mile = 0.8 km
6 miles = 9.7 km

5 miles = 8.0 km

1 foot = 30 cm

15,000 feet = 4,500 to 4,600 m
8,000 feet = 2,400 to 2,500 m
30 feet = 9 m

10,000 feet = 3,000 to 3,100 m

6 foot 1 inch =185 cm
10 feet = 3 m

“for miles around” = “for kilometers around”

“fraction of an inch” = “fraction of a centimeter”

“thousand-yard stare” is an idiom which relates to
shellshock, numbness, blankness, but I mean the term
with less of an emphasis on having been traumatized
(although that’s an interesting angle to possibly ex¬
plore in another work); and literally as well, as though
there was something specific you were gazing at, 900
to 1000 m away. The literal image is where you
should start in interpreting my use of the idiom.

CHAPTER 1

Every person finds themselves stuck in a rut, not from
time to time, but at all times. If you were to see every
movie in existence, there would be quite a variety of
movies, but in the end, no matter what, those movies
would only be movies. So it is with life, we always and
always are living and no matter what, every new ex¬
perience we seek is an instance of living. We are con¬
demned:

What would it be like to be dead? But there is no “be
like” in death. There is no “like” to “be”. There is no
being. If there is an afterlife, then that too is life. We
are stuck in this rut of life and there is no escape’.-

I watched movies a lot when I was younger. And now
I have lost my taste in movies. I can watch movies
and derive a certain amount of pleasure from them. I
consider some of them beautiful works of art. But I
have no hunger for them. They even teach me inter¬
esting and useful lessons. But I have no need for
them.-

What would it be like to live at the end of the world?
How many people would really exist? Would your
mother exist? If she is still alive, give her a call on the
telephone. You have very little time left. The people
on the other side of the world, they may not even ex-

13

ist anymore. That’s how little future there is left. But
your best friend exists, I take it. Give him a call on
the telephone:

If you lived in a rut, you would start out as a small
creature in the bottom of the rut, comforted by the
line of life, how it took you somewhere. As you grew,
you would become confined by the rut, but you will
never grow tall enough to see outside the rut, all you
can see is the sky with its clouds. The clouds are be¬
ings that you can never attain, realities you can never
understand, books you cannot read, and signs that
have no meaning. They are random and different —
and your rut is compelling, it tells a story, rather, it is
a story-

And then, when the impossible happens, and you
grow tall enough to escape the rut, you find yourself
in a vast, muddy, plain, with ruts everywhere. And at
a certain age you will find a canyon, the greatest rut
of all:

But as you pass by for many years the dazzling rock
walls, even the waterfalls and natural stone arches,
and the vegetation, the locusts and grasshoppers,
lizards and the vegetation, all the things in the canyon
bottom, and you climb the rock walls, and go beyond
canyons into even mountains — you circumnavigate
the globe — then it finally dawns on you: this earth is
a rut, and the exploration of it is the rut:

14

I was walking down the street one day and I was ac¬
costed by a young woman. I don’t know where she
came from or where she was going. She talked to me
for 15 minutes about the Republican Party and the
Democrat Party and the Green Party. Was she trying
to get me to join a new party? She spoke of the lead¬
ers of the parties and the trends and the new direc¬
tions, so business-like, so pure. I was so polite that it
was she who ended the conversation, with a hand¬
shake. I walked on, questioning the meaning of
being:

One time God took me up on a mountain (in the
Spirit) and showed me the real world spread out be¬
low me. He said, “If you cast yourself down from this
mountain, you can have all this reality” and I said to
God “Are you tempting me?” and he said “No. I do
not tempt, nor am I tempted.” And I told God “Do
you want me to have all this reality?” And he said
“It’s up to you.”

One time, in the Spirit, God took me down into the
fakest place on earth, Fake Valley. I cannot tell you
where it is, but you will discover it. In fact, every time
you take a step closer to the real world, you will real¬
ize that you were always living there. In Fake Valley,
the temperature is always whatever it is. People in
Fake Valley say hello, but sometimes they show their
emotions. People in Fake Valley say a lot of things
about how they feel, when the moment is right. They
play records and tell people things. They go to the

15

therapist. Or they don’t. In Fake Valley, all of life is
lived/

I would never put all my money where my mouth is.

If I did that, I’d be overcommitted to my current un¬
derstanding of things. I don’t know everything there
is. How could I? So if I committed to what I believed,
then I’d get trapped in a spiral of success, succeeding
and succeeding over and over at things that aren’t
quite right)

What is the last thing you will ever think? There’s no
way to know, because when you die, you will be un¬
able to think that last thought you thought. You have
to keep on living to think. When you die, all your
thoughts will never have been. And the whole world
you live in, including me, will never have existed. You
are the measure of all reality-

I have known you since you were in grade school. We
were best friends. Today, I bought a windbreaker that
reminded me of you: only in that it was a wind-
breaker. It was a good deal at the store. I did not
know how much it cost and it turned out it was on
sale. This was a mercy from God. You wore a different
kind of windbreaker, but we both wear
windbr e akefs }

Do you remember me? I hope that you do, at least
sometimes. I hope that in your little world, there’s at
least an old faded photograph of me. Do you put that

16

photograph up somewhere where you can see it? Do
you remember the games we used to play on the play¬
ground at recess in grade school when we were best
friends? I don’t remember anymore. But I remember
that you were my best friend. That much I remember.
I couldn’t tell you what I said to you when you were
my best friend. But I remember your name, and I
guess in my little world there’s maybe even two faded
photographs of you, that I have put up somewhere I
can see?

I remember when I was a kid, I used to take the hose
and crimp it off so that the pressure built up and then
I let it open and the water came rushing out. Every¬
body used to do that, and now nobody does that:

Can you hear my voice inside you? That would be
kind of strange. But it wouldn’t be strange if you had
heard me reading this aloud to you over and over. It
wouldn’t be strange if I had spoken to you enough, if I
had gotten under your skin. You are no longer my
best friend from grade school. Now you are my friend
from high school. I know that you have a likeness of
me in your head. You built it out of what you ob¬
served of me. Once you made it, you were satisfied
with your work, and you went on and on with life.
Such a being, made out of facts, has no soul, no inner
life, no mystery. I took my mystery away from you,
and you kept going on and on in life. I will never see
you again}

17

Everyone knows something that they shouldn’t, some
fact that worms its way into their beings, which eats
holes in their brains and lays eggs, and the eggs hatch
and become larval facts, and whole theories and sets
of assumptions are marbled into your poor, tired
brain. And in my brain, all these things have eaten
away at my ability to think and feel, and for all my
knowledge, I now know less, even nothing}

When I grew up, I admired tired people. I didn’t real¬
ize they were tired. I thought they were gentle, and
wise, and loving. And so they were. But they were
also tired. Now that I am becoming a man, I find my¬
self becoming tired, just as they were tired before me.

I have taken on that mantle}

What a mystery it is that I’m alive. Did I try to be¬
come alive? No, I came into being out of nothing.
There is some story of becoming, a sperm fertilized an
egg, the egg divided. But I came into being out of
nothing. There was nothing before I existed, and now
I exist. This is the mystery of sleep. When I fell asleep
last night, I existed, and then I didn’t. And then I
awoke. What is it that I have done, to go from con¬
sciousness to consciousness? I do not know, and I will
never know. What was the moment of falling asleep
like? I can’t know, and neither can I know the mo¬
ment before that. In fact, I have no idea what hap¬
pened yesterday, other than these strange facts and
assumptions that are laid up inside me, and the fact
that I know objectively that there is a past. I will ei-

18

ther sleep or die in the next 24 hours, and so nothing
I experience right now, I will know, or ever know.
Nothing is real. And I am alive}

I haven’t opened a can of food in a while. Why is
this? I have not had occasion to do so. If you order
me to cook a meal, and I have a can of food, I guess
I’ll use it. I will obey what you have to say, and this is
life. But the can of food is left by the wayside until
you, or something else, commands it. The food will sit
on the shelf at the supermarket, and my life will never
encompass it. Somehow there is the life that I live,
and then there is the life that intrudes into it. If you
split a model airplane in two and then glue that onto
a model aircraft carrier, then you’ve made something
new out of both of them}

I will rest. Today is the 7th of July, 20—.

Look at those people over there who crave to be loved.
They seek to be loved, they are afraid of losing love,
when they don’t have love, they quake}

Here I am, and I crave peace. I seek rest and quiet,
and calm}

Look at me, I am in turmoil, and look at them: I won¬
der, are they ever loved? Can I, who long for peace,

19

ever be satisfied? My life is quiet, and calm. Can they,
who long to be loved, ever be satisfied? Their lives are
full of love}

Everyone knows where to put the best things: down in
the cellar where no one will see them. And then years
later, the next people who own the house can go down
into the cellar and find the things, stacked in a corner.
Then, they can enjoy them}

You were always looking at me (I’m speaking to S.,
right now, not to you), in the middle of the room was
where I was, being looked at by everyone. And I
turned and saw you and felt the blood rush through
me, because you were the one woman I could fall in
love with. And the reason I could fall in love with you
was because that was the night of the 16th, and you
were there on the night of the 16th. Does that make
sense? I just hope that makes some sense to me. To
me, it means that on the night of the 16th, that was
the night you were supposed to be there, and you
were. Why were you there? I think it was because you
wanted to see something new. Well, I was there in the
middle of the room, talking to the other people. I was
something new to you}

I am glad that at this point I at least know how to be
cool. When I was younger, I wanted to be cool. I
found cool people and wanted to be them. I have no
idea if I became them, but I did become cool. S., you
found me on a cool night, being a cool person to

20

younger people. At least I know how to do that}

If I was a hammer, I’d probably be left in the shed
most of the time, the hammer of a family that didn’t
do a lot of woodworking. I’d hang on the pegboard
and slow my breathing down to almost nothing and
feel the universe reverberate — it reverberates at such
a low frequency that you have to practically die to feel
it. Paradise}

I will rest. It is the evening of the 7th of July, 20—.

It is evening, and suffering is of two varieties. There is
the suffering of misfortune, and the suffering of water¬
falls. The suffering of misfortune is not where I live.
Suffering is not a misfortune. I am completely happy, I
suffer. Suffering is a waterfall, a great pounding
sound, and a spray of water. It is there, bears witness,
processes the water, I approach and walk away, and
the suffering persists}

If I do not want love, do I not want God? But I want
to be loving. How strange that I want to give what I
do not wish to receive. In doing, I will be, and I want
to be love}

I have a spot of kindness in my heart for all the peo¬
ple who ask me questions on the street. I am a

21

stranger, and they are stranger-lovers. To be a
stranger-lover, you must be a lover and a stranger,
that is all. We are surrounded by people we don’t
know and will never know, and they are surrounded
by people they don’t know and will never know'.-

Where do people come from, and where are they go¬
ing? Does anyone know? I don’t know where I came
from, and I don’t know where I am going. We are all
strangers, and strange people. The problem of weird¬
ness: how is it that weird things happen to normal
people? The problem of weirdness: how is it that nor¬
mal things happen to weird people? The problem of
weirdness: how is it that normal people are actually
weird people, and weird people are actually normal?

The world is fraying and being sewn back together.
This is perpetual motion, perpetual reality. I can see
it in the relationships that fall apart and are sewn
back with apologies, the wornness of the cloth, cloth
doesn’t stay new in this world)

There was a tree with a great heart, great heartwood,
but it rotted out on the inside, and the tree was cut
down and laid waste. Deep inside me, am I rotting
out, or am I growing a new life? When the tree was
cut down, we saw what was living inside it, in the
place of the rotting heart. We saw the den of a small
creature. And yet the small creature itself has run
away, leaving the stump alone. And the stump is at
peace, but despite itself, will new life emerge? But it

22

is not the sort of stump to produce new life. But will
there be a miracle? Everything I want and don’t get is
a great tearing open of my stomach and ripping up of
my capacity to want, and then when I am filled I fi¬
nally know the meaning of joy, and of filling)

When everything is added up, there’s nothing to do
but put the result down in a book, to record the busi¬
ness of the day. And so it is with me, but I do not
record the business of the day, I record the business of
a few minutes of the day)

I am growing weary and I am hounded by the sense
that I have to work. Please forgive this interruption. I
may not write again until tomorrow, when everything
will have changed)

It is the evening of the 7th of July, 20—.

I am skipping a stone across the bay of a lake. The
stone touches the lake five times and then splashes
into it. I am sitting under a tree by the lake and I see
a silvery pattern in the small ripples on this day
which is cloudy, under a light breeze. S. is jogging
down the path in her athletic clothing and passes by
and I continue to look out at the lake. The trees bend
down into the lake with their branches and small fish

23

swim around the leaves of the trees, which have de¬
scended. S. approaches once again, time has drained
out the bottom of its vessel and I know that I will
only have one more chance to talk to her, and when
else will I see her? So I call out to you, and you say to
me, “Who are you? I know I’ve seen you before.” And
I will become as smooth as glass and I will slide. And
you, S., will be caught up in the moment, and you will
be as smooth as I am.-

Can anybody tell me what time it is? I think it is
time that I got up and made myself a snack. I put
some peanut butter on a piece of bread, and then put
another piece of bread on top of that and I eat the
sandwich. I drink a glass of milk, tall and cold. I have
some almonds and grapes. I am sitting on the hillside,
looking down at the farmlands, the goats and cows far
off, just so I can see them, eating their own snacks,
those grazers. I see their heads descend in simplicity,
their mouths devoted to their purity, their quietness,
tearing some grass out of the earth and chewing:

Growing up, I remember the older people telling me
all kinds of stories. One of the stories involved trust.
There was a man in my town who used to work in a
big company. He said this story about the big com¬
pany (this is as best as I can remember it): “One day
we had a big workshop. A workshop is when you get
together to learn something new, like a seminar. And
they had me get up, and they had me put on a blind¬
fold. And I stood on a platform. And they told me

24

‘Your coworkers are there for you. They’re standing
behind you. Do you believe me?’ and the coworkers
said ‘See, he’ll believe us, if we tell him that we’re
here’ and I said ‘Yes, I hear where your voices are,
you are standing behind me.’ ‘Now, to test the trust¬
worthiness of your coworkers, fall back and they will
catch you.’ So I fell back. And my coworkers caught
me.”

The sky is clouded over and there’s a wind coming out
of the west. It’s a day for a storm to come, or for a
storm to go. The storm will drop a pile of rain on the
ground, and the ground will take in what it can. Then
the storm will blow away and the sun will come out,
and little weeds will set out on their journey of life,
exploring the sunshine all the way up to a certain
height, diligently living, diligently being themselves
out in the fields. Out on the lawns, as well. The cloud
comes and is full of rain, but it passes over us and
leaves us dry, and we see off to the east a beautiful
sheet of rain come down over the desert, and we know
that on this summer’s day, it will all evaporate in an
hour out there!

I build things in the back yard by myself. I built a
desk, so that I could have one in my bedroom. I will
sit in that room for many hours, so I thought I should
build a desk. I made the desk out of mahogany wood
and I think I did a good job. Or, I think I did a terri¬
ble job. What a waste of mahogany. Such a heavy
desk, such a pain. Such a wonderful desk, such a beau-

25

tiful desk. My desk gives me great satisfaction, as I lie
back in my office chair and put my feet on it and take
a nap}

I am not sure, but I think that it may be time to get
up from where I am writing and do other things. It is
the 8th of July, 20—.

Today I went over to the pawn shop on 55th Street.
That’s about 6 streets away from where I am staying.
Maybe that’s a mile away. I have a piece of jewelry
there, an old necklace, a family heirloom. I keep want¬
ing to get it back, but I always run out of money. I
have enough money to get it, and then I spend the
money. But today I got it “out of hock” and I can take
it back to where I am staying and put it with my be¬
longings}

What does a man like me need with a family heir¬
loom? I don’t know. Maybe someday I'll have a family
I can pass it on to, and then they can pass it down.
And we’ll keep it in a safe place, every generation, un¬
less we have to sell it. And maybe I won’t ever have a
family. Maybe I can give it to somebody else’s family,
so that they can have an heirloom. Or I could be the
godfather to S.’s daughter, if S. ever has a daughter.
And when S.’s daughter turns 21, she can have the

26

necklace].-

Near 55th Street, there’s another north-south street
called Maple Street. Over on Maple Street, there’s an
apartment where L. lives. L. has a major stereo sys¬
tem. I went over to his apartment one time and he
played me some Black Sabbath. He was telling me
about the time he drove over to the lake and found
some boys fishing in a pond over on the backside of
the lake where you’re not supposed to go. How
strange to see young people fishing these days, and yet
they do)

I think I hear a knock at the door. Maybe it’s S. Let
me go seel-

No, it was not S. There was a man there with a clip¬
board. He asked me if I was registered to vote. I said
“Yes, I think so. But it has been a long time since I
voted.” He looked at me and said, “Okay, would you
have 5 minutes to sign a petition? They’re going to
build something over on 50th and Garland St. It’s go¬
ing to cause significant traffic impacts. They’re going
to use eminent domain.” I look at him and said “I
don’t know. I don’t know which is better, to build or
to not build. I don’t know if eminent domain is a good
or bad thing in the end. I’m sorry, I can’t commit to
signing the petition.” He looked at me and then
started laughing. I didn’t understand why he was
laughing, but I liked his laugh. He said, “Okay, that’s
the way things are, that’s the way things will be.”

27

As much as I would like to keep chatting with you on
this fine, cloudy day, I really think I need to get back
to some sort of chore. I don’t know why it is that I
need to do things. Maybe doing nothing is better than
doing things. Maybe doing nothing is just being.
Maybe just being has value. But I will get up and do
something. I could go out and chop wood for the fire.
Or I could take a drive into town and get some sup¬
plies: gas, some corn-on-the-cob and packages of meat
for tonight, even some lumber for the most recent
project. Or I could do the laundry. I could even do
that. There are all kinds of possibilities, and I’m sure
to do something today. So I can’t chat with you for¬
ever. I’m glad you found your way to my porch. Come
back around 6:30 and there should be some food on
the grill. You’re welcome to have some:

Right now it’s the afternoon of the 8th of July, 20—.

I thank God for all the people who have come and
gone from my life, leaving their claws in me. S., I’d
like to share some of my spirits with you, like my
spirit of the level gaze, and the spirit of the empa-
thetic laugh)

The sand runs down to the bottom of the hourglass,

28

and I watch as two young boys play chess on a giant
chessboard. I don’t understand their game, just as I
don’t understand who I am or where I am going or
what I am saying)

There’s a flat place in the middle of the desert where
one man crouches down, the sun on the back of his
neck, and he stares down at the ants who live in the
desert. He’s all alone, trying to escape his real calling,
which is as a man in a city, staring at people until
they become uncomfortable, and speaking to them
about the sadness of this world)

I am tripping my tongue trying to tell you something,
S. I don’t know how to say it yet, so I will try to re¬
member to try to say it some other day)

It is night, and the crickets are going, the night of the
8th of July, 20—.

Sitting down in the chamber of the cave, in the heat
of the day, in the cool of the cave, L. and S. and I sat
down in there. And we saw a scorpion walk from near
where we sat, out into the desert heat)

I pulled a stick out of the fire, and looked at the end,
smoking and red-tipped. I mashed the end of the stick

29

on the rock, leaving a black mark. And I put the stick
back in the fire, to burn some more. Life gives you
lemons, and you make lemonade, and there’s always
something for you to process, something left over from
the past)

Where did I put my glasses? Sometimes I have to
wear glasses just in order to read, but other times I
wear them to read the signs. I really do need my
glasses. But the irony of the situation is, that I most
need glasses in order to find objects in my cluttered-
up apartment, objects that are lost and greatly
needed, such as my glasses. It is not as though I do
not need my glasses even more in order to cope with
the world, though. Just... well, there they are.

Okay.-

If I were run down by a tiger, I would look up at the
tiger and I would think “Why?” in the moments before
it killed me. Or perhaps it would not kill me, perhaps
it would look at me for a moment and lose interest'.-

I am stirring the ashes of a dead fire in the middle of
the day, and it is the 9th of July, 20—.

If I ever meet S. for the first time, I'll watch her care¬
fully, and eventually show her this poem, which I

30

wrote on a night of terror'.-

Where do the suffering people go?

Do they go to church?

Can you find them at the bar?

Are they at The Pharaoh’s House or the Egyptian
Coffee Room?

Do they live in my house

Or do they only live in apartments?

If I find you, can I keep you?

Can I stare into your weeping eyes
And clasp me in your shaking arms?

Can we walk out in the streets
Get somewhere lost, and just for
Once, lament?

The rest of you can go to hell
And then you’ll meet me face to face
You pleasure-lovers go to hell and
Learn to be a human there

I only say that as I starve
No, I say again because I love
I love you all, now go to hell
And find the blessings only there

Blessed are the poor in spirit
Blessed are the pure in heart
Mourn and weep and wail and grieve
And you’ll be comforted

31

But if you soothe yourself

With home-made balms

With the caresses of your own hands

Traded through a friend, perhaps

The tiniest part of you will speak
It will not be ignored
When you hear it,

It will pin you to the rock face
It will devastate you and crush your
Soul

Then,

Blessed are the poor in spirit
Blessed are the pure in heart
Mourn and weep and wail and grieve
And you’ll be comforted

She will look up after reading it and say “Okay.”

I thank God for my past self, that poor, ignorant
man-child, slaving away at the soup-pots, saving up
money to buy clothes, getting dressed to go to church
to listen to the sermons which inspired him to give to
the needy, who put in a good word for him with the
neighbor girl, who looked at him with admiration,
which raised his spirits when he finally learned of it,
and then he went to university and got his degree in
law on the buoyancy of her smile, and now he prac-

32

tices law in a well-to-do town in a beautiful part of
the country}

And there are piles and piles of old things I have to
throw away, but that is the way of everything, every
good thing comes at the expense of some bad
things}

It is night and darkness comes up out of the ground,
midnight tolls and it is the 10th of July, 20—.

There are three sisters (I know not how many belong
to their family), who sit on my shoulders and tangle
my hair as they struggle. Their names are Prudence,
Adventure, and Mission. Mission has a stony face and
fixed eyes. She is beyond beauty. Adventure has a
ruddy complexion and merry eyes. She looks like a
tumbleweed. Prudence looks just as she should, wears
a hat on sunny days}

I am a spiraling shape in a pond, where there’s an
opening that allows the water to sink down into an
underwater cave. Down in the cave there is an old
button that I lost from my coat, a brass button. I
could see that old button as it went down, falling off
of me as I sat in that boat, watched the old button
get sucked down in this strange pond, watched it go

33

down into the underwater cave, which can be ac¬
cessed, as I accessed it, with a lungful of air and some
sort of sense of determination. Did I get the button?
No, I let it go. There are more buttons at home}

I am a turkey wandering the forest with my fellow
turkeys. A group of humans approaches, with guns.
Do they want to shoot us? Should we wait around to
find out? However, we are turkeys and we do not un¬
derstand the meaning of guns. So we simply pass by,
without thinking either which way, and the men do
not shoot us, because they have come to this forest to
shoot deer}

I am a postmaster in a small town, knowing who gets
what letters at all times. I carry this knowledge
around in my head and try not to act on it, so as not
to turn this town both claustrophobic and agorapho¬
bic, that combination where the crowd is too close,
and everyone runs away from each other}

Prudence tells me I shouldn’t write to S., as she is far
away, in India. Adventure tells me to write to S., as
she is far away, in India. Mission is silent, so busy do¬
ing her thing. I look on her from over here and my
heart is full. I want to just run up to her and build a
church around her}

The morning is awake, on the 10th of July, 20—.

34

I have a problem. Whenever I have a problem, I try to
focus on it. Then, I focus too much on it. But if I fo¬
cus a lot on it, I become stronger, able to solve every
other problem because I focused too much on the one.
But then I never solve the one problem, which may be
just as well, because it helps me to solve all the other
problems. However, the one problem that I want to
solve most, and thus focus the most on, is the one
that breaks me and tears me apart, which is why it is
the one that I want to solve the most’.-

It’s the time of day when I typically feel like taking a
siesta. I am afraid that some day I'll fall asleep right
in the middle of a business meeting, and I'll be called
on, and wake up with some sort of statement to make
to everyone else that I will later regret:

If you put your mind to it, you can do just about any¬
thing. One day I had a boulder to push up a hill.

Now, mind you, I'm a big, strong man. I can bench-
press my own weight. But this was a really big boul¬
der and a fairly steep hill I was trying to reconcile. So
I pushed the boulder with all of my strength, but I
only got it up halfway before I got too tired. There, I
stopped. But I knew that if I just put my mind to it, I
could push the boulder all the way up the hill. Be¬
cause if you put your mind to it, you can do just
about anything. So, I took a break for a week, and

35

worked out some, but also just went for a walk around
the lake a few times, and went for a swim with S., and
walked the dogs, and pulled some weeds, and lay
around a whole day watching television, and did my
usual occupational hazard on my laptop at the laun¬
dromat and coffeeshop and then I came back to that
hill at the back of the property, back to the boulder,
and visualized getting to the top. And I pushed it
about another quarter the way up. The next weekend
I got some friends to come with me and we got it the
rest of the way up, because that last part is steeper
than the first parts}

One time when I was little, I visited my great-aunt U.,
who was in a coma at the time. We sat in her room
and prayed for her, and sang some songs, in the hopes
that she could hear. At least, we could hear ourselves,
and maybe our spirits touched her spirit directly. I
wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how things work}

Great-aunt U. never did recover from that coma. So
we had a funeral service for her, and talked about her
life. She was a tall woman, who had had three hus¬
bands, two of whom preceded her in death, and the
last who left her when her illness got too bad, 20
years before her death. One good Great-aunt U. story
was the time she caught a man stealing from the store
where Great-great-uncle H. had his business. She told
him he should be ashamed of himself, then told him
he needed to get in shape, because he was overweight.
He felt very self-conscious and sad about this. He was

36

just a poor man. But she couldn’t pick up on this, be¬
cause she wasn’t too good at reading minds. So she
had him doing push-ups on the floor of the store, and
more importantly had him move a bunch of boxes, in
exchange for not telling the cops about him:

I tend to move on in life. Hello, how are you? What is
your name? Good. Now I know your name. Oh, you’re
moving to Kansas? Kansas... now that’s a place. Well,
goodbye! See you later, I’m sure':

If you talk to me long enough, you'll realize that every
so often I have a lisp. It’s something that comes and
goes with me. I don’t know why. When I was younger,
I tried to stop it, but nowadays I just kind of let it
happen. When you get older, people get more polite
and you kind of just don’t care about anything any¬
more. You don’t care about getting ahead in life, you
don’t care about impressing people, you don’t care
about your reputation, so you certainly don’t care
about some lisp of yours}

I’m doing the laundry. I’m doing the stupid laundry,

S. You know what that’s like. The tide of birds flying
over your car, defecating all over it. Time to go the
car wash. The earthquake that tears down your house,
leaving the foundations. The moon, illuminating the
path at night that leads you to a new place on the
beach, where everyone is dancing and singing}

It takes a certain amount of guts to bicycle down the

37

hill by my house. It’s a pretty formidable slope, I'll al¬
low, and the dirt on the hill is powdery when it’s dry,
as it always is, mixed with cobbles. I have never had
the guts to ride down that hill on a bicycle. However,

I have walked up and down it numerous times, and
even that was chancy. I’ve skinned my knee on that
hill, and worn a hole in the seat of my pants, the time
I slid down it, caught up in the wonder of the mo¬
ment:

Can you count all the mosquitos that have ever bit
you in your life? There are a few places on earth
where a person can grow up to the age of 18 and
count their mosquito bites on the fingers of one hand.

I had a cousin who lived in one of those places. One
time she went camping with us and howled in the
morning, to see herself covered with the bites. We
laughed and threw water balloons at her}

Have you ever had Thai basil? I think I have, since
I've been to a Thai restaurant, and ordered something
that said it had basil in it. You never know though,
they could have used regular basil. I don’t know that I
would know the difference, although I certainly like all
kinds of herbs. I like basil, but I don’t know if I could
distinguish between the Thai kind and the regular
kind. Do you know what I’m talking about? Some¬
times you’ll meet someone and then everyone else
who’s kind of like them, is the same person to you}

Pulling teeth must be a difficult line of work. At least,

38

it would be hard for me. I would tend to pull too
slowly, too gently, in the fear that if I just ripped the
tooth out, I would cause extra damage. It’s like,
there’s a certain amount of damage in life, and then
there’s extra damage. But if you pull too slowly, it
just hurts and takes a long time. There could be some
poor guy in the waiting room who has really been
looking forward to getting his teeth looked at, getting
his problem tooth pulled, if necessary, and he’s got to
go out and do his business out there in the world, and
life is a big pile of hassles and he’s looking at his
watch and feeling angry and sorry for himself at the
same time, both a raging lion and a whining little kid
simultaneously (let such spirits migrate to a different
region of the atmosphere, away from poor mortals
such as us!) Well, anyway, I suppose if I went to
school to be a dentist, I would either learn how to pull
teeth in a timely fashion, or not'.-

I’m really relaxing here as I wait for the train to
come. Oh, now I can hear the crossing gates coming
down, off in the distance. I suppose I will have to get
my briefcase together and get ready to get on the
train. I guess I'll have to pick up the thread another
time. It is just after work on the afternoon of the 10th
of July, 20—.

39

How is it that at 1PM, all the people are starving in
Africa, at 2PM dying of AIDS, at 3PM being shot, at
4PM digging the graves of their children, and at 5PM
we get off work and go home, as free as a kid? I don’t
want you to feel bad, S. I mean, maybe I kind of do. I
don’t know. No, I don’t want you to feel angry or dis¬
gusted at yourself. Or at other people. But there’s
something here that calls to me. Can you feel sad with
me? And can you become focused, alongside me? And
just keep on going? That’s basically all I ask of you}

I don’t know if anybody really knows me, which is
fine, I guess. I didn’t always want to be known, and
nowadays it’s just so hard to communicate all the ma¬
terial to other people. It can be freeing to just go off
on a tangent whenever you want, with whatever group
of people you meet, and not necessarily reconcile your¬
self with yourself. But I long to be gathered together
and straightened out. And I’m getting older}

Until I was 14 years old, I had a major, undiagnosed
problem with resentment. I don’t know how it was
that I would resent people so much. It was just natu¬
ral to me. Anger, envy, being wronged, it all came to¬
gether with me. Especially how it was that everyone
could do whatever it was that they would do, and in
various ways this would set me up for failure. My
goodness, I had to succeed, and I was fine if I failed of
my own essence, but boy howdy, if you were to get in
the way of my success, I could hate you like no other.
Then, when I was 14 years old, I read a classic of our

40

religion, God Wants You, by Zacharias Xavier Smith.
In that work, I read that resentment was a grave sin,
the worst of all, almost. And so from that day for¬
ward, I strove to not be resentful. I figured out all the
ways I tended to become resentful, and all the situa¬
tions where I was safe. I understood it all, but what
really changed me was the time when my parents
died, and I started dating (not S., somebody else),
and my life was being pulled apart as well by the fact
that my brother had gotten drafted in the Army and
there were riots in the streets of Detroit, Chicago,

L.A. and even somewhere on the other side of the city
where we lived. After that I didn’t resent very much
anymore’.-

I can tell you stories all night long, S., and you’ll tell
them to L. when you see him. And L. will come back
to me and I'll say to L., “How has your life changed?”
And he’ll be confused, because the stories you’ll re¬
member, this is my fear, are the ones that leave every¬
thing the same:

But you are stronger than all that. I know it. The
consequence of being the way that we are is that we
can be so much better. There is a joy that perhaps
you know, but which I did not know until now, realiz¬
ing who you really are, and therefore who I can really
be}

I want to apologize a million times for this, S. I really
do. For saying so many heavy things, I feel as though

41

I’ve said a million heavy things. But I can’t apologize,
because there’s nothing to be apologetic about}

Come, look out at the world in all its sadness and de¬
cay, and love -it}

The cicadas are singing up in the trees by the backlot
and I see you looking away, trying to process what
I've just said. I know that there are times that are
critical in a person’s life, and I want you to know that
I love you, although I have never even met you, and
you have already disappointed me and left me for
someone else. It is afternoon of the 10th of July, 20—.

S. laughed at me one time and told me I was funny. I
accepted the compliment, because everything is funny,
and so, I know that I exist. Not everyone exists to ev¬
eryone else}

There’s a crack in the floor of my room where the
bugs can crawl in and out, from outside to inside, and
from inside to outside. A kissing bug used to come in¬
side and bite my face. Oh, the kisses of the kissing
bug! This was when I lived in South America. The
kissing bug told me a story, the story of Chagas’ dis¬
ease, and now I am in America. This is how I know
you people in America, because I was sick and some-

42

one took pity on me, and now I speak your language,
as my heart fails}

There’s a smooth cover to my heart, and I say what¬
ever I feel like I have to say, and underneath it all, ev¬
erything is funny, there is nothing that is not funny.
We’re laughing with God, which is a form of laughing
at God, but not the irreverent kind. This is where I
begin, and why I am so eager to run away from my¬
self, if only someone would run with me. And I can
hardly explain myself.-

I read a book all night long, a tale of a village in Eng¬
land that I once lived in, and there, many generations
before my time, there lived a girl who sewed and sang
and went for rides in the garden. And then she met a
man who proposed marriage to her, and she would
have accepted except that her parents refused, and the
thing that was unaccountable was their reasoning:
they had none. And over time he kept coming back to
try to reason with them, but they had no reason. And
he kept coming back to try to court her, but she re¬
jected him, because she was tired of him, though she
had been charmed for the first few years she knew
him. And this reason he accepted, because nothing re¬
ally matters}

I dropped a coin down into a vending machine and it
was the last coin I needed to drop and the machine
went “clunk” and down came a bottle of soda. A bot¬
tle of lemon-lime soda, very low sodium, complete

43

with 38 grams of sugar. I drank the soda, and regret¬
ted it, for I was far from home and knew that it would
be a long time before I could brush my teeth:

I am at the convenience store down on 48th and
Grasslands St. and it is getting on in the afternoon,
headed toward evening. It is the 10th of July, 20—.

One thing that I have learned over the years is to
never say “yes” when you mean to say “no”. But the
greater lesson has been to never say “no” when you
mean to say “yes’/

There is a crust forming over the coast of the nation,
where the particulars of our nation meet the particu¬
lars of the ocean floor. There, on the edge of the con¬
tinental shelf, there’s a broken place, where magma
extrudes, and forms this new crust. There was a coral
reef there, but it has been destroyed, and all the fish
have swum away. Where did they swim to? Surely to
a place that they can understand:

There is only enough phosphorus for us to live an¬
other 100 years. Or maybe another 50. And then
many of us will starve from lack of water, since we’re
pumping it out of depleted aquifers, and then a lot of
us will kill each other over oil. But the earth always

44

had an expiration date, and we can at least love each
other in the coming times of trial:

A truck broke down in front of our apartment right
out on Ulysses Grant Avenue in the middle of the
night and I went out to help the driver. We pushed it
over to the side and he said “Thank you, so much.”
and I stood there awkwardly, for no reason apparent
to myself, and he said “I don’t have any money to give
you” and like an idiot I said “Pay it forward.”

There was a cat who I used to take care of when I was
a kid, who leapt from the fence down into the yard.
That guy was a real bruiser, and so we named him
Rocky. He actually killed a raccoon. We were in awe.
My brother saw it start to happen, and I got over
there in time to watch it finish happening. This was
the last time I really knew the fear of God:

I have a garden, a nice garden, a pure garden, of
pretty weeds, and I go stamping into it with my heavy
shoes, and tear up the weeds, and put in ugly vegeta¬
bles, and I will have my harvest, but the wild plants
were so much more beautiful. Ah, God, please come
down and take me! I smash up my own garden, and
compact the soil, and nothing ever really uncompacts
soil, not in the long-run. I can never go back to the
garden of weeds. Or, I can. Yes. I can. Do I dare? I
may dare. Perhaps I dare. We will see if I dare. If I
dare, though, my vegetables will be cut off in the mid¬
dle of the growing season. And perhaps they will con-

45

tinue to grow. All you will see are pretty weeds, but
the real use of the land has gone underground}

Have you ever had banh mi? It’s a kind of Vietnamese
sandwich. It is quite delicious. The first place I had
banh mi, I thought was the most amazing place in the
world. And then I learned that it was just another
banh mi place. There are many places that serve banh
mi. If I ever get ahold of S. again, our first date won’t
be at a banh mi place, instead, it’ll be somewhere
nicer than that}

S. looks across the table at me at a restaurant and
says “So, we haven’t really talked in a while.” and I
say “Yes, you’re right. Well, I’ve been having issues at
work with an attractive female coworker, want to hear
about it?” “Okay yeah sure” she says thinking “Not
again.” “Well, you know, I don’t know it’s just like...”
“Really?” she interrupts. “Really?” See the subtext is
that I keep being attracted to my attractive female co¬
workers. That’s what’s running through this conversa¬
tion. And since S. is my wife, it’s her job to keep me
on track. And since S. is not my wife and this is isn’t
even threatening, this conversation is kind of boring.
And since S. is not my wife but wishes I were at¬
tracted to her, this is kind of tired}

The light in the sky is getting a little less intense, but
the air still holds heat. It’s late in the afternoon of the
10th of July, 20—.

46

The thing that I try to remember is that though I’m
inadequate, insincere and unworthy... well... OK, so,
given that..}

One time I was humiliated but I don’t really want to
talk about that, but it kept on happening so I had to
be bullied, and now I’m against bullying although it’s
a cliche to be against bullying but I realized that ev¬
erything good is a cliche, so... given that..}

And finally, I once took a hike in the woods and found
a snake, so I killed it out in the woods, and I took its
rattle home and it didn’t seem all that great. I was
sad but I had to keep the rattle, sad because of what
it cost, and I had to keep it because of how much it
cost. What a strange thing to carry around with me
until that time the house flooded and I had to throw
away everything}

I remember one time L. threw me a curve when we
were playing baseball and I hit it, but the ball went
foul and so that was my closest to getting to first base
in a long time and for a long time after. I’m okay with
that, it was P.E. class anyway}

The evening beckons, with all the fierce clouds of the
10th of July, 20—.

47

Will anyone listen to me? Probably not. When people
read books, there are some things they don’t read.

I’ve given up writing books, but maybe you will listen.
If I talk to you, S., I mean really talk, I mean not like
I am now with this book, but really, face-to-face talk¬
ing, maybe I can warm something in you that hasn’t
died}

I sewed a bag together which I had let get torn. And I
didn’t do that great a job, so the poor bag opened up
and dumped out all of its contents, which were some
things I had purchased at the general store, some new
blades for my axe collection. I paused a moment to
try to figure out what to do. I decided that I would
wrap the blades in the canvas bag, and try to carry it
under my arm, with my other arm holding my other
bag of supplies. And then S. came riding by on her
horse, her eyes piercing all the dust between me and
her. And she said “Oh, I see that you have a broken
bag. Let me help you.” And with great kindness she
got off her horse and sewed the bag back together,
just like that. A legend in her own time}

I’ve built a few things in my time. One time I built a
marriage. Her name was O. or maybe Q. It was a very
long time ago, 500 years ago. We met at a senior cen-

48

ter, and it was clear to both of us that we were im¬
mortals. We knew what it was like, all the comments
people would make about how it would be terrible to
live past 80 years, all your friends would be gone, then
what would you do, with all this future, the endless
weight of years. But I tell you the truth, for us im¬
mortals, the way we cope is by living in the moment.

It is very hard for me to remember the past, in fact,
the fact that I even barely remember that I have ever
been married is due to the fact that I work hard to
keep certain memories alive. Another memory that I
work to retain is the last thing my father said before
he died, which was “Keep the faith.”

As the rooster said to the chicken once, “Hey there,
fine lady.” That’s what I said to S.’s sister once by
mistake, thinking she was S. That was a funny night,
the night of the masquerade. I was wearing a Robin
Hood mask, and I can’t remember which of them was
wearing a dragon mask and which of them was wear¬
ing a moon mask. We ran around that masquerade
grounds, that great banqueting hall of mirrors and
chandeliers, that pleasure garden of set-up lanterns
and outdoor heaters, all the coals in braziers, the well-
dressed people, the violinists and cellists, there was
even an order of monks who visited, who stared at
each of us in the eyes, and chanted prayers as they
passed through, and as we ran, the color came to our
cheeks, and we dashed off the grounds, S., and S.’s sis¬
ter, and I, and we found the last store open in town,
and were going to buy something, but we realized we

49

had left our money back at the masquerade, and no¬
body was scared by those girls’ masks, nor were they
scared by mine:

I’ve been running all my life, leaving everything be¬
hind. It’s like that car race I was on, the one where I
drove my buggy across the desert. The key thing in
that race is to keep going, and to never give up, and
when you break down, you’d better be able to fix
yourself, or else you’re going to lose the race for sure
and maybe even lose your life':

I think the tide is going to come in soon, and cut off
my retreat from this darkened beach, so I will begin
the long process of going home to go to bed. It is, just
barely, the 10th of July, 20—.

S., remember back when we lived on Mars, and we
would go out, you and L. and I, and L. would push
you into the dry icicles and you would throw sand at
his space-helmeted face, and I would be all worried
something would break through your suits and let the
carbon dioxide in, or the bitter cold?

And L., remember the time you and I and S. were be¬
ings of pure elemental light and we found a cave full
of humanoids and we decided to enlighten them, you

50

know, back when you were red, and S. was blue, and I
was green? Remember how they started to believe in
God?-

I don’t want you to feel guilt, I want you to feel com¬
passion. Nor do I want you to feel guilt over whatever
lack of compassion, unless that leads you to grow?

Processing all of the iron ore in this mine will take a
really long time, and I don’t know if I really will get
to see the end of all of it. I’ve been working here for
35 years, and honestly, my back really aches and I’ve
been trying not to complain, but here you are, you
who always draw out my complaints, so I’ll tell you all
about my poor back. But it’s been a good run, me
and this mine, and I think Pm actually going to just
work at it another 35 years, until Pm 72 years old?

If cartons of milk had pictures of missing presidents
on them, I suppose there would just be a picture of
our current President Mitchell, who has been running
away these past few weeks, leaving Vice President
O’Connell at the helm. And what a wild ride it’s
been! But President Mitchell must be enjoying the
beach, down in whatever South American country he’s
in, just relaxing. I remember one time I was really sick
and S. did all the work around the house and even
those spacey little kids of ours pitched in, got stuff
done. Oh how delicious that cough syrup was, how
wonderful that fever! I can still remember it. My
carpal tunnel throbs a little less to think of that

51

week)

Everyone I know has kids. Little kids, big kids, book
projects, dogs, friendships, romances, cars. This is
part of what it means to be, that we take care of
things and wish they were more adult. And that we
get proud of them when they grow. And sad when
they don’t grow, or even when we lose them. I remem¬
ber when my horse got sick, as I was riding the Pacific
Crest Trail, and we had to put her down, that’s how
sick she was. There will never be another mare like
her'.-

I ran a marathon once. The first 16 miles were a
breeze, but then the second 16 were pretty tough, and
nobody told me that it was just a 26.2 mile race, but I
was fine with that. I ran somebody else’s race, some
32-miler’s race. And that’s interesting, running some¬
body else’s race. I must have had that guy’s fans, his
family, rooting for me. And I must have had his aches
and pains, his fears. I must have used his visualiza¬
tions instead of my own. The real reality was some¬
where else, in the land of 32-mile races. But the ap¬
parent reality was that I somehow didn’t notice that
I’d crossed the finish, and nobody continued to run
alongside me. In my apparent reality, I was ahead of
everyone else, when nobody ran with me, and maybe
in the real reality, I was winning the race’.-

A windmill once stood on the brow of a hill, drinking
in the wind, grinding grain, you know, being a wind-

52

mill. I rode up on my steed to the windmill and asked
for the windmiller, who had a daughter I was inter¬
ested in, named S. And he came out and we chatted
about the state of the wind, all casual-like, and then
the windmill spoke out in a grumbly voice: “Cease
your chattering, you little people. Stop talking about
what you do not care about. I will smack you for your
idle talk.” And we looked up at it and looked at each
other, and it was then that I asked for his daughter’s
hand in marriage)

Corn grows in the rich black soil of Iowa, and it was
there that I was taught my ABCs. “A is for Apple, B
is for Barn, C is for Corn, D is for Dog, E is for Eleva¬
tor...” Our schoolmaster knew that the roots of our
education had to be in the soil of Iowa, so that we
would understand that the nature of life is to grow
food, that this was our society, our local reality. But I
grew up and left Iowa, somehow the 20th century hap¬
pened, and things changed, and somehow, though we
all eat, very little is about agriculture in my life. S.
wants to grow a garden, but we just don’t have time,
what with all that’s going on in our lives. But when
she teaches the children their ABCs, she goes back to
her Iowa roots: “A is for Apple, B is for Barn, C is for
Corn, D is for Dog, E is for Elevator...” Why not?
Agriculture will always be important)

As the day progresses, I question my use of time. And
then I realize that questioning that isn’t always a
good thing. And that realizing that that isn’t a good

53

thing isn’t always a good thing. And then I have to
pull this move, that’s like focusing but it’s not focus¬
ing. And then somewhere on earth somebody bakes a
loaf of bread, and takes it out of the oven, and serves
it to his or her family.-

It is the bustling city night of the 11th of July, 20—. I
duck into an alcove, the entrance to a store that
closed several hours ago, and relax a little and think
what to do next.

The good guys need to be determined, to be cut off
from reality in some sense. Because the bad guys,
they’re sociopaths. And one of the traits of sociopaths
is that they don’t learn from experience. And by not
living in reality, they are able to amass considerable
riches’.-

I wish that I could live in the ideal country. In the
ideal country, criminals would get caught 100% of the
time. So, there would be no crime. No, rather, crimi¬
nals would never want to commit crime, so there
would be no crime. No, rather, there would be no
criminals, the memory of them would die away, they
would be a curiosity. No, rather, criminals would be
forgiven’.-

54

I brought you a flower. And no, you are not S. You
are somebody else. This is an interesting moment for
me. S. and I broke up several weeks ago. And I really
like you, and this is our second date. And I want you
to know that I like you. And I’m wondering if I should
be dating you, or if I should stick with S., with all her
winning ways. And I keep remembering S., but here
you are. Aren’t I supposed to be getting over S., and
moving on with my life? Well, since it’s been several
weeks, and no more, I guess it’s understandable if I’m
still kind of stuck on her. Needless to say, I shouldn’t
talk about this too much out loud}

I think I just saw S. walk in this joint with another
guy. A big scary guy, but I’m not really scared of him.
I’m scared of her. Will she look at me as though she’s
found another guy? It’s at moments like these (that is,
at many moments), that I stand up a little straighter,
and adjust the load in my backpack, and hitch it up,
and keep on walking}

Something inside me is off, my stomach hurts a little
bit. Was it something I ate? Was it something I
thought of? Am I being played like a violin by a per¬
son who likes to pluck, or to do tremolos? Am I a
door being knocked on by a policeman who knocks to
kill? Am I a radio being dialed from station to station,
over and over? Am I lizard on a rock, or a squirrel on
a branch, ready at any moment?

I have the vague sense that I shouldn’t have left my

55

son in charge, that he’s left the door open to the barn
and the goats will get lost, and yet I will turn in for
the night in this motel here in town, having trans¬
acted a lot of wearying business. It is the late night of
the 11th of July, 20—.

Here is a poem I wrote with the drool coming out of
my mouth as I talked in my sleep:

Oh Why? Oh oh oh WHY?

Must my love have such definite hair?

And a particular height?

And a build, that can be conceived of?

For in this world, in which
Every point falls on a line;

At a distance, two points can coincide

When in truth there is an infinite

Infinite distance, between any two contiguous

For instance, if I had 1.25 meals today
The distance between the truth: 1.25 meals
And a lie: 1.250001 meals,

Would not be 0.000001
But infinity.

Because if you are exactly at 1.25, if you are zoomed
in

So close on the numberlife, the numberline, that that

56

point

On the line

Is not infinitesimal, is simply real

Then 0.000001 is of enormous magnitude, being as it

is

So incredibly far it is from true
Infinitesimalhood

You are simply real to me,

Or at worst, a bit infinite,

But from a distance
Others resemble you and this
Makes me talk in my sleep.

(That was written at the stroke of midnight on the
11th of July, 2011.)

Shopping with S. in the agora was always better than
going alone. As followers of the Way, we often found
ourselves in need of each other’s prayers. One time a
Jew named Bar-Jonah told us we were pig excrement
— we hadn’t cheated him or blasphemed the one true
God, but it is possible we had offended him, had in
fact done some wrong of which we were unaware, but
perhaps which still we could have avoided or uprooted
if we had only grown more in our Lord/

57

One time S. noticed a man possessed (or should I say,
“oppressed”?) by a demon. The man would talk to ev¬
eryone, furiously, but not loudly enough to be under¬
stood. His face was contorted, his hair wild, and S.
said that she could sense a dark, aggressive energy
coming off him, which held her where she stood in her
fear}

But I, in my obliviousness, walked over to him and
laid my hands on him, as if I wasn’t doing it, and
prayed in the name of the Messiah that he be deliv¬
ered — and because it was God’s will, he was}

Lightning strikes and the day turns inside out, the
morning of the 12th of July, 20—.

My dear}S}

The longest summer I ever spent was a winter without
you, such a profusion of cheer in the midst of extreme
cold, the winds rushing down from the Canadian
Shield — O, you know that my insults are verbal love
taps, I’d leave you a crawfish in your okra if I were
there with you and our little ones, but this teasing
must suffice for now}

If my handwriting is even less legible today, it is be-

58

cause I am riding the rails from the east of the north
of our rectangular country to the west of the south. I
look forward to when the train rolls over the Cause¬
way of Doom and we will all look from side to side at
the pits of lava. Then our train will smell of sulfur and
the temperature will exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit in¬
side the train — the conductor will not dare to turn
on the air conditioning for fear of the ash getting in
the filters. There will be summer then, but I long for
the early-springtime of your smile and the autumn
briskness of your eyes’.-

I will put this reminder of my love in the pneumatic
tube at the post office just before the Forest of Con¬
templation and imagine it from time to time as I pass
by the shrines and sculptures therein, on its more di¬
rect journey to your heart’.-

Sincerely,

—Yours truly

There is little to see or do in the residential motel in
the western part of town, so I sit down on the bed and
try to think of you the right way, it is the afternoon of
the 12th of July, 20—.

One day when S. was a disciple of Jesus, she woke up

59

at the first hour, and arranged herself, and ate a half
of a little loaf of barley bread, and set out to see the
Master. She loved the Master, she felt safe, calm, with
him, with his gentleness. She was ready to follow him
— not to the death, not yet — she couldn’t have said
if you had asked her, how far she would follow him,
perhaps there was nowhere specific she would follow
him, she simply, in an undifferentiated way, followed,
and would follow’.-

At the second hour, she arrived where he was staying.
She greeted Simon the Zealot and asked where the
Master was. “He is eating breakfast, come with me
and let us join him.”

Jesus was quiet during the meal, and only acknowl¬
edged S. and Simon with his eyes. Then he got up,
and stepped outside and looked up at the sky and re¬
marked that it looked clear, that the day promised to
be fine and hot:

And then at that moment, one of John the Baptist’s
disciples arrived, with empty eyes. “You are weary”,
said Jesus, “Come sit with us and tell us why you have
come.”

The man replied, “Jesus, your cousin, John the Bap¬
tist, is dead. Herod has killed him.” We did not learn
the whole story until later, the scandal of it. But this
news in itself was enough, and Jesus, at that moment,
felt a bell of doom, a fire, an amputation, as he gazed

60

from his position of eternity, his sadness. S. knew ex¬
actly how he felt, because she noticed the expression
of his face. And Jesus looked at all of them there, and
asked John and Mary to come with him. And S. and
some of her friends among the disciples followed after
at some small distance. And then John and Mary
turned back and came and told the other followers,
“He’s going off to be by himself.;

So we all went back to our private grief, by then I had
arrived, and spoke to S. about what had happened.
And then I had to go to work, so I left. What I tell
you next is what S. told me, later on}

(I remembered John the Baptist as a real human,
among a nation of half-grown men, because he was a
voice calling for repentance.)

S. and the others, after some reflection, decided that
some would go back to their work in the town, while
others would go back to their work on the lake. S.
went with those who worked in the fishing boats, Pe¬
ter, James, John, Andrew and the rest. They saw a
crowd forming a half-mile down the coast, and rowed
over, to find Jesus being asked numerous questions.
Jesus was so tired, so broken, but all the disciples
loved him as they heard his wisdom, as he was speak¬
ing it to the crowd. This, was their master}

And a crowd grew, and grew, and I am sure you have
heard the story of how Jesus once fed 5,000 people,

61

and this was when that happened. And having given
his heart in teaching, and having handled the power of
the Father, Jesus’ eyes were barely alive and without
a word he left, and John knew that this was a time
not to follow him.-

And by now the other disciples had gathered, and the
Twelve set out in a boat, the evening dying. And S.
went home with Mary and Martha, with whom she
was living at the time, and they spoke about what
they saw that day-

I was busy traveling for the next two days, and did
not hear what transpired until I got back, and S. came
over with her tent-in-progress and told me the story,
of what happened next, in her scattered, “speechless”
way.-

She got most of her story from Simon and Phillip, and
basically this is how it went: out on the lake in the
night, a storm came up and the disciples were afraid.
And then, they saw Jesus walking across the lake to¬
ward them and — S.’s heart was full to recount this
— they thought he was a ghost. And Peter stepped
out onto the water, and sank after he looked at the
waves, and Jesus pulled him up and he and Jesus got
in the boat. And at some point the disciples realized
that that was the moment when the storm went away.
And they passed to the other side, having been stuck
in the storm all night, and in the morning a crowd
formed again, and Jesus, walking on a new earth,

62

taught, and taught, both people who loved him and
people who we learned later were the ones who
wanted to kill him:

“When he was alone,” I asked S. “Do you think he
slept?”

“After the time when he fed the crowd?”

“Yes. He was alone then.”

“I think he might have, that would be wise.”

“But what if he didn’t? Which is the better rest, to
sleep or to pray?”

She looked at me and laughed. “Funny!”

(And she is right — that is a funny question.)

The sun stands late in the sky, with its final fury of
the day. The plants stand up, straining to draw their
water from the ground. Then, I pass into a sheltered
place and it is the late afternoon of the 12th of July,
20 —.

In the primitive culture, the aboriginal culture, of the

63

people of the western Northern Valley, there is a par¬
ticular kind of purification ritual that is performed
when a young woman and a young man choose to just
be friends for the rest of their lives. A nest is built by
the banks of the Upright River, the chief river of the
western Northern Valley, and it is built by the friends
of the two. And the families of the two are not told, it
is a grave secret never to be openly discussed. The
family must preserve ignorance or the appearance of
ignorance’.-

The two are separated in the woods near, but not too
near, the wooden nest. And they each must find the
nest. Whoever finds it first must hide nearby the nest,
and when the other finds the nest, and has turned to
hide, call out “You have found it.” And then they meet
in the dark and shake hands, and start a fire with the
wood of the nest, and throw each brand, one by one,
into the river, keeping just one for each to get through
the night)

During the night, they sit by the river, and talk of
whatever comes to mind, and when dawn comes, they
walk into the village for all appearances lovers return¬
ing from a tryst. And so they will appear to their
families until they “break up”, or perhaps until death
parts them':

Night falls on Earth and on Venus sulfuric acid rains
down. It is late in the night of the 12th of July, 20—.

64

I feel a little bit tired right now, a little bit washed
out. I think that’s okay. I think that’s because I had
an exciting day yesterday. I went on a quick little trip
to the Moon. I was a Moon tourist yesterday. I took
some pictures. Take a look — no one has ever taken
these exact pictures. Anyway, I know that you have
better things to do right now: some kind of work, I
imagine}

In the next life, I wandered as a teacher all over the
earth. I was alone, so very often. I was happy. One
time a wicked man turned from his ways. It was beau¬
tiful. One time a regular person decided to follow me
around, and I taught him. One time I found where S.
was staying and we went out to the local botanical
gardens, and I got to tell her what I was learning}

Could I imagine what I need to imagine? When I
write about S., I am writing about a real person, who
exists exactly as I describe her. But in which world
does S. really live? Perhaps S. is simply alive in my
personal universe, and does not really exist anywhere
else. There is an S.-like person somewhere, somewhere,
somewhere. There may be hundreds of her, living
throughout time. The S. that I know is simply a cos¬
mic reality, a recurring theme throughout time. The S.
that I know is a cosmic, archetypal symbol, an image,

65

a theme. The S. that has her own universe — perhaps
when all the veils are stripped away, beyond the next
life, there we will really meet:

Trust is a difficult thing to develop. For me, at least. I
tell everyone all of my secrets yet I tell no one any of
my secrets. Do you think you know me? You do, you
know so much. But you know nothing at all, at the
same time. Trust is a difficult thing to bring back
from the grave. It requires that you repent, which is
simple, yet impossible:

In the next life, I found L. one day, working as a gar¬
dener. He was trimming a bush in a hedge labyrinth
(a hedge maze for artistic people), and I was walking
in the labyrinth, seeking to be lost, which was my per¬
petual theme in the next life. “Huh,” I said, “Remem¬
ber all the times on earth where we would walk by a
hedge and you would notice it and I wouldn’t?” And
he said “Hello, there! Yes, I do remember. How
strange to see you right now.” And I said, “Well, carry
on, you must keep these plants disciplined.”

Everyone has dreams, fantasies, recurring images. Or
perhaps it is just me who is like this. I don’t know any
universe but my own. But in my universe, everyone
has dreams and recurring images. One image that
haunts me all the time is that of the dog that cannot
rest. This dog is always barking, always running, chas¬
ing, frantic, can’t lie down. People come upon this dog
and feel inside themselves a tension, a madness, a con-

66

cern. As I sleep, this dog comes to me, and I am over¬
whelmed. I go outside for a walk at night, just so that
I can be with this dog, and then I have become what I
imagined:

It is the afternoon of the 14th of July, 20—, and the
city is awake.

Everything is false, nothing true. Religion and faith
are false, atheism and suspicion are false. The past
never was, or was, falsely, the future has never been
and never will be. Hope is false. Everything is false,
and yet the greatest he is that there is no truth:

To me, there is only one S., but for S., I wonder if
there are many who are like me. The stranger loves to
be loved by the lover of strangers, and to the lover of
strangers, many are strangers and so remain.-

From where I am situated, I think about what is true
and what is real. Even God, the one I speak to, he is
not real. There is nothing true and nothing real. And
yet love is real, this is the truth, and I can live this
love. This is all I can do with this love, to live it. And
as I live it, I see God out of the corner of my eye, and

you/

67

At the street corner, the woman curses her luck, she
dives into misfortune, she has been plunged into it.

Her cell phone is dead and right now is the moment
she needed it, to call up work to tell them that the
bus was late and please don’t fire her but it will take
her a while to get there}

You were probably young when you first heard this
song: “Make new friends, but keep the old / One is sil¬
ver and the other gold.” At this point in my life, it can
be a struggle to do either}

I put a lot of eggs in one basket back that one time
that I thought I was in love, and also that other time,
and that other time. Apparently, I kept moving the
eggs from basket to basket. Okay, well, I still have
some eggs}

I went to Italy one time and found out that it’s a lot
like South Africa and Southern California. They all
have a Mediterranean climate. Also in Italy, they have
famous art and architecture, but this was also the case
in Israel and North Africa, and for that matter,
Southern California and South Africa, all of which
have Mediterranean climates. And there were other
similarities between the regions, but there were also
differences}

How can I love people? I can work and I can be open
to them, I can hear them and respond to them. How
can I love more? What am I doing right now? I find

68

that I ask myself that question over and over and have
no idea what the answer is: neither how I can love
more, nor what am I doing right now. Life is a mys¬
tery and then the moment comes, and I am called out
of life, as I am called into love:

My real work, my true work, beckons and I must leave
you here at the restaurant. Have you had too much to
drink on this lunch break? I can drive you to the office
if necessary. We’ll repark your car where they won’t
tow it. How do you feel? It’s the afternoon of the 14th
of July, 20—.

Here I am at the family reunion, having eaten what I
should not have eaten, sitting on the couch, among
them all for the first time in 10 months, suffering from
intestinal gas — foully. They speak of that which of
which I know not, they speak of subjects that do not
interest me — please, I will not say which subjects
those may be lest I offend you — I do not see any
value in offending people, unless the cost be worth¬
while — please, don’t take on any offense!

I am quiet, I am hearing the grating voices, I am exer¬
cising my patience, I am passing gas all by myself.

And my 7-year-old niece, that child, is crying because
something has happened, and she comes over to the

69

couch and ignores me, the uncle whom she sees so in¬
frequently, and she cries and cries in utter misery.

And my intestines are twisted and untwisting, and I
sit in my shame. And we pass a quarter hour like this,
uncle and niece, at the family reunion}

The mother of that niece is my sister-in-law. My sis¬
ter-in-law is an old friend of mine, who married my
brother. How it is that she did not marry me is a long
and strange story that I may or may not tell. We shall
see. My sister-in-law has made some dish or the other
and now it is time to eat it. But my intestines are not
happy, and when my intestines are unhappy, my face
is incapable of happiness. But this is a family reunion,
and family is not about happiness}

S. goes to her family reunions more frequently because
her family has stayed in town. When we meet up for
coffee, she tells me all about how wonderful her family
is. My family isn’t bad, and she doesn’t tell me the
wonderfulness in a bad way. I’ve met some of her fam¬
ily, and I believe her, and I am not envious of her
family. I am honored to be her friend, to receive the
light shed by them, and after all, what I love so much
in S. is not all of her origin}

Oh, where do we keep the fruit in this house? There is
a moment in every non-drinker’s life where they would
have a drink, but they don’t drink. That rut has not
been gouged, but has been half-carved. I need a piece
of fruit right now. I am not sure what it will do to my

70

intestines, but it will ease something in me}

Now we are gathered around the television, watching
a movie. One thing that is convenient about our fam¬
ily is that we make decisions quickly. We decided to
watch an animated film by the studio that made the
films about the talking canned food. It is a Japanese
studio that is well-regarded. I also liked their film
about the planet where people all grow plants}

Oh... my intestines. Our family is a polite family, but
I must leave, I go outside and bend over in the night
air, for relief. Out there, my 5-year-old nephew also
escapes and looks at me curiously, the uncle whom he
has not seen in several years. It’s like he barely recog¬
nizes me. He asks me what I am doing and I say “I’m
in pain. Do you know what pain is?” He answers “Uh-
huh”, which is fortunate and unfortunate. “Well, yeah,
my intestines are hurting, so now I’m trying this out
to feel better.” “What are intestines?” I can tell that
this is going to be too much for me at the moment so
I say nothing. He loses interest and goes back
inside}

My sister-in-law and my mother eventually come out¬
side to smoke. They see me and do not make fun of
me. They tell me I should go inside and have some
pie, oh no, that might not be good. Well, just take
care}

I am driving home from the family reunion, this night

71

of the 14th of July, 20—.

I asked God one time if, when I died, would I go to
heaven? Or would I just fail to exist? He said nothing
in reply, but I didn’t mind too much at the time.
Sometimes I want to die, and sometimes I am driven
mad, but at the moment, I am okay with not know¬
ing/

As tension builds, the ice on the river grinds and
buckles, and people have to stay away from the river.
They can get right up to the bank, but they cannot
cross it under such treacherous conditions. In fact,
they cannot even use boats on the river, which are
normally well-suited for the flow of the river. How
strange, how things change and make things impassi¬
ble for a time’.-

Can there be a place in between here and there? If
there is, then I will have to go there and see what
goes on there, and then again, I will have to go from
here to a place in between. If I am going to a specific
place, I can never get there, if I wasn’t always capable
of going there. I hope that I am not boring or confus¬
ing you — boredom leads to not paying attention
which leads to confusion which leads to lack of com¬
prehension which leads to boredom.-

72

The sun shines on me every day and I like it. I like
the sun, I am a desert person. I like the heat. The
heat kills me, I like to be killed. The sun blesses the
land with energy. The plants grapple with the air,
wrestle with the sun, they pull the sun toward the wa¬
ter in the soil, they merge the heavens with the
earth:

Every kite I have ever flown has gotten caught in
something, and so I long ago gave up the practice of
flying a kite. When we were kids, my sister-in-law
(that is, the girl who later became a woman and mar¬
ried my brother) and my brother and I used to play
around in the field near our house, the one with all
those beautiful oak trees. And we destroyed a couple
of kites and gave up on that project}

I remember one day, after school, my sister-in-law —
this was when I was in fifth grade and she was in
fourth grade — she found a lizard living underneath
the house. She loved lizards back then, loved to catch
them, and she got it and put it down my shirt and I
squealed like a little girl}

Putting everything together, I’d say the day that I
best remember L. was the time he first met my sister-
in-law and had nothing to say to her, but then he re¬
alized his faux pas and became embarrassed and
started saying something stupid. I think she was his
“type”. She said to him, “Don’t worry, everything will

73

be okay.” in the middle of his politeness. And then he
lightened up and had a good time. I am not certain
why I remember L. so well in this incident, and not
her instead)

S. has never met my sister-in-law. They have never
been in the same city at the same time, as far as I can
figure. I suppose that’s just how things are. I wonder
if it would be a good thing for them to meet some
time. I suppose it would probably be fine for them,
but I’m not sure if it would be a good thing for me’.-

I am staying up too late on the night of the 14th of
July, 20—, but life is short and the jungle calls to me
with its night scents.

A wolf entered my heart and tore at it and ate my
life, for what was done to me when I was in elemen¬
tary school. And now it is a big husky, only sometimes
ill-tempered, sometimes just dumb. And yet for the
people who stole my guitar and left the door open so
that the rain got into my photographs, there is only
an old collie approaching her oldest age, and for you,
there is just a little puppy of resentment:

Someone bought me an axe when I was too young to
appreciate the gift, but there came a day when the

74

tree fell over, when I was 11 years old, and I knew ex¬
actly what to do}

Corresponding with people in foreign countries has
provided me with a lot of stamps from foreign coun¬
tries. I put them in a notebook — not that they’re
worth much to anyone but me — and I put the note¬
book on my dresser. There’s a little stamp with a pic¬
ture of a lion. I like that lion, there’s something about
its coloration that speaks to me}

I remember one time I drove to the car dealership and
bought a car as fast as possible. I confused the car
salesman so much. I said, “Will you sell this car to me
for $10,000?” ($2,000 below list price.) “You have 1
minute to decide or else I walk out of this car dealer¬
ship. 59 58 57 56 55 54 53:}}?

I will always regret what I say in my sleep. I will re¬
gret the secrets that I divulge, and I will regret all the
things that I say that don’t make sense — those are
the deep secrets that cannot be known by the con¬
scious mind. I will most of all regret the things that I
have written when my mind was not sharp. It is late
in the night of the 14th of July, 20—, and I will now
go to sleep}

75

There is a deeper peace that I have only found with
God — with everything — but which I have not felt
with anyone else, no one else in particular, deeper
than rage and despair, which are themselves deeper
than the politeness and the functionality — I want to
be in a peace that’s worthy of its cousin, the wrestling
that almost kills me’.-

When I was 11 years old, I was well done with my
teddy bear, my constant nightly comfort from ages 6
to 9. But that was the year I got very sick and while
in hospital, Mom (good old Mom), brought me the
Bear, and I held him in comfort, surrounded by the
machines of recovery and the humanity that was try¬
ing to keep me alive:

I picked something up off the ground, some scrap of
metal, and the heat of the day made me hang my
head. I sat at the bus stop, examining the metal, won¬
dering if I would ever give it a name, when a young
woman sat next to me and asked about my metal. I
had no words to describe it — and though anyone else
could have easily done so — neither did she. She told
me her name: S., and I told her mine’:

A storm cloud passes by, a thunderhead from off the
great lake named Endorea, that great evil of water,
the land heats up, heats up the air, the air pulls the
moisture into towers, which press down on the earth. I
can see a smile and a frown in the cloud, I can feel my
end and my beginning in it. And yet these clouds

76

hardly ever rain on us, they save themselves for the
mountains. Oh God, let me climb up a mountain
someday-

I asked God one time what the meaning of being was
and he permitted me to live one day more. I asked
him what the meaning of my life was and he sent me
some coincidences, some signs, and I asked the mean¬
ing of these people. I asked my cosmic friend what the
meaning of those people was, and he whispered “Re¬
member”, and I asked him to remind me, and I re¬
membered my job, which is love. And I asked him the
meaning of love, and he was so silent, I was shattered
by his presence:

There is a fatigue that passes all understanding, which
floats in like fog out of the lake of the heart, which
leaves a dew sometimes, which is around the edges of
the most wakeful moment. And there is a peace that
comes, that I do not understand, sometimes because it
is remarkable, from another reality, and sometimes be¬
cause I have already forgotten it as I go to do some¬
thing that I enjoy-

I grew up in a pagan city on the great sea back in the
ancient days, and I always used to go to the temples
of the goddesses to seek peace in my life, to look on
the serene priestesses, but then I fell in with a family
of Jews, and converted to their male God, my real
friend, and that was only the beginning of my days as
an idolater, seeking my peace with other women than

77

my beloved)

In the middle ages, there was a controversy between
those who said that God had no nature, and those
who said that God just was his nature. And somehow
there is a right way to approach God, but I do not
know what it -is'.-

Last year, I was struck dumb and because of this was
unable to finish my last year of school. I’ve been try¬
ing to write a book ever since and I’ve been wondering
if I renounced speech and thus should join a
monastery.-

A whole room full of people with aching joints all
have to stand up at once to let themselves out in a
timely fashion, and this is the air that I breathe on
this evening of the 15th of July, 20—.

I got up out of the grave when I heard that all my
mourners were having a party over to one side, several
months after my interment. I got up out of the grave
and walked over, still smelling of embalming fluid, and
entered, and everyone treated me politely, yet at the
same time also with a sense of disapproval of the
scene that I was making'.-

78

I'm pouring myself a big mug of coffee right now, oh
coffee come lift my spirits. Coffee is the fuel of genius
and the motivation of many a slave, toiling in the pits
below me. Sometimes I sneak out of my infernal office
and bring them some coffee, and in exchange they
bless me, and for a moment my eczema clears up}

One time, I was given anesthesia that didn’t make me
unconscious, but it was the kind that prevented me
from moving voluntarily. For several years, my brother
dragged me around with him, until one day my sister-
in-law let him start learning how to perform magic
tricks. He wheeled me over to the Magic Palace down¬
town, the beautiful old library — how did they afford
such a place? They initiated him and taught him some
simple tricks, trick ropes and tricks up the sleeve, the
kind of thing you can catch}

Then I heard a speech that will remain with me all
my paralytic life: “Now has come a fateful moment in
every illusionist’s life. You are not your own, you have
been bought with a price when you initiated yourself
into this, the oldest profession. You must choose the
source of your magic, your path. If you remain at the
Palace, with us, the truly enlightened, you will be a
servant of Satan’s materialist army, promoting the
perception that magic is only a sophisticated illusion.
If you pledge your soul to the wild and the degener¬
ate, you can cast yourself out on the streets to per¬
form the pagan, the occult, the grubby, the chaos
magick, the mucking around with sigils and spirits.

79

With us, your magic will always work, and if you cast
yourself out on the streets, often your magick will fail.
But you will know more than anyone else, you will
know, you will know! With them, you will proclaim
loudly that magic is real, but with us, as in every¬
thing, if you want the true power, you must conceal it,
you must become a man of deep and hard secrets. You
must keep your promise as a law: magic is an illusion
and you must never tell anyone that it is real. Now,
what do you choose?”

My hair got wet the other day and I was walking
around outside as it dried off. An older woman came
up to me and started to play with my hair. “Uh!” I
said and she said “Oh, sorry, you looked just like my
son.” I asked her what her son looked like and she said
“Oh, he’s broad-shouldered and blond” and I said “Yes,
that sounds like me, is he as tall as me.” “Yes, and
he’s just a little skinnier than you.” “Wow, so how is
he doing?” “Oh, he’s doing just fine. He’s in school to
become a paramedic.” “That’s really cool” I said. “How
much longer does he have till he graduates?” “Just a
few more months” “That’s really nice.” “Yeah, yeah,
well, I’ve got to go now.” “Thanks for the conversa¬
tion!” “Oh, yeah, any time!”

I rode a roller coaster today. I screamed as I went
down the big drop. It shook me and rattled me, and
then I got off and I wanted to cry. I don’t know where
I was supposed to cry, in the bathroom? I hate the
bathroom. So I walked around and I didn’t cry.-

80

One time I threw up in a movie theater because I
hated the movie I was watching but I was in the mid¬
dle of the aisle and I didn’t want to get up to go to
the bathroom and I thought I could keep it in but I
couldn’t. The people in the row ahead of me could
smell it in the seat beside them and they got up and
complained to the manager and he came and threw
me out:

When my brother goes to the library, sometimes it
goes like this: Brother: “Ok, I’m going to the library
until 4 o’clock.” Sister-in-law: “Can you tell me what
you'll be reading? In case something goes wrong.” I
caught my brother reading Popular Mechanics one
time when we were young and he was quite ashamed,
having dreamed of inventing a perpetual-motion
car}

I’d better pull over before I crash the car. I’m dead,
this night of the 15th of July, 20—.

“I don’t know” — do you remember that, S.? These
were the words I spoke to you the first time we sat
down underneath the awning outside that restaurant,
that is, on our first date. You asked me who I was,
and especially what I wanted to do with my life. I had

81

to speak truthfully — I didn’t know. I knew that I
wanted to do what God wanted, and yet I also had
my own preferences. I wanted to have 2 children, two
of my own, and yet I wanted to only adopt, because
this world has enough children, and too many un¬
wanted children, and yet I wanted two biological chil¬
dren. And I wanted God to guide me, but I wanted to
know things myself. And so my face was clouded over,
and I didn’t meet your eye. And I’m sorry, I like your
eye, I want to meet it. I want to give you the respect
of a clear direction or position in life. But I just don’t
know. And that is all I can say to you today-

I'm curled up on the couch, it is raining outside, there
are crickets chirping inside this house, oh, July rains
on this July day, the wood is getting wet outside, we
will not burn it tonight, oh, shall I read this book be¬
side me? It is a book of love, of some lovers in some
place I will never visit, some time far away. In this
book, the lovers quarrel and make up, the lovers dance
and are locked up for love in a dungeon of separation.
The lover that doesn’t know the one doesn’t know the
other. I know all this because I know what I have
read, and I have read this book before)

There’s a caravan departing this town tonight, a cara¬
van carrying illicit spices, and I have determined that
I will not tell on these criminals, I have my own con¬
cerns, my own tent to mend, so to speak. Let these
men make off with the illicit spices, and I will guard
my little supply of dill)

82

Before anyone can go to sleep — can die in such a
way that they can rise again — they must come to
peace. If you will die to self, you must be struck dead
to sleep, or you must come to peace, so that you can
drift off in peace}

One morning I came outside and saw that there were
mushrooms in the yard, and contrary to everyone’s ex¬
pectations, today, we could all see the fairies dancing
around them. These fairies were wearing blindfolds
and could not tell that day was upon them. These
fairies were being carried along by the momentum of
the night)

“There is no end to love, so you had better put on
your backpack and learn a new way to walk” said my
grandfather R. He was full of wisdom, that old man,
that kind man. I saw in his face many wrinkles and he
said “You will have wrinkles like me some day, if you
continue to live. But earn wrinkles, please. Please
worry and struggle and laugh and weep.”

I tend to eat whatever is put before me. Now that you
know that, you will try to put lizards and squid on my
plate. If the squid is well-prepared I will eat it. If the
lizards as well are well-prepared, then I will try them
just to see what a new thing is like. But if they are
alive or uncooked, I will leave them be}

The owl is hooting and I am in the moonlight of the

83

moon of another universe, and I am alive. It is the
earliest morning of the 16th of July, 20—.

Last night, I went on a date with a famous author —
a dream come true. And everyone wanted her, except
for me)

I spend my whole life agonizing over my decisions, and
you know what’s going to happen? In my next life,

I'm going to live it all over again, and just go with the
flow. Or maybe that’s what’s happening in this
life..}

I built a cardboard box one time out of old things.
Then I decorated the outside with paint. Then I sold
the cardboard box to a poor person, who uses it as a
house now. And now I make more of these houses out
of cardboard boxes. I am trying to put some color into
this town)

I lived on a reservation for one year. I was trying to
get in touch with my aboriginal heritage. (I am
l/16th aboriginal, which is enough, in the land that I
live, to qualify to live on the reservation.) We would
go out and make wine to sell. We were a hive of indus¬
try. We would build houses for ourselves. We took
care of ourselves. The reservation was a place of love

84

and care. I learned a lot there, and now I go back to
my place among the majority race, who live
nowhere’.-

I lived in a garden once. This was back when I had six
legs and wings. I crawled up and down rose bushes,
seeking out aphids to devour. Life was good. It really
was. The sun, the rose bushes, the aphids, everything
in its proper number and arrangement. Sometimes
huge realities would come walking through — but at
the time I did not know that it was walking that they
were doing — and I could feel the Being radiating
from them, and it stirred something inside of me that
I still haven’t made sense of to this day.-

Some of the aboriginal people of the southern South
Valley once taught me something valuable that I will
never forget. They gave me a special name, Rnqua,
which means, “You there”. It was their name for out¬
siders, which they give temporarily to most, but to
me, it was the name they sent me away with, the
name by which they wanted to remember me:

Cars pass by on the street and the refrigerator hums
and I think of the things I have to do on this morning
of the 16th of July, 20—.

85

I just remembered something. My sister-in-law used to
date this 40-year-old pop song producer, back when
she was right out of college, several years before she
married my brother. Back then, she was a singer. Nei¬
ther my brother nor I particularly trusted the guy, but
the fact of the matter is that he made her backing
tracks for her as beautiful gifts — beautiful gifts of
bubblegum!

Oh Lord, I am desperate. I’ve been in a terrible de¬
pression these last few days, weeks even. I don’t even
know. My mind is a pile of spaghetti, cooling off. I
can’t handle life, I’m underwater, with new lungs that
hate me, breathing water and surviving in grimy bare
sufficiency. I'll do anything. I'll even exercise!

My ears are splitting from all this noise. I don’t know
why I go to rock concerts anymore. Every time I go, I
remember as they turn things on why it is that I don’t
go, and eventually, at some point, I forget why it is
that I don’t go to rock concerts very often. Then I
come home and look through my diaries and see the
same thing. This is how come I’m still alive. I will ma¬
ture to a certain point and then be cut off, at the
proper stage of ripeness — whether they want a ripe
me or a green me. I am clumsy for life, for all the
yummy things, and all the experiences, and so it is
important that I forget, to allow myself to tread water
for a few more decades!

I’m full of air right now. Yes, you are being spoken to

86

by a hot air balloon. I hope you are paying attention,
because this has never happened before in the history
of the universe and will never happen again}

I’m a little bit hungry. I sometimes allow myself to go
from being a little bit hungry to very hungry, as I
work the assembly line here in the coastal city of the
industrial province. I turn into a machine, and the one
interesting thing is the slow advance of my hunger, my
mind captivated by my millions of lively thoughts and
then my thousands of dull thoughts, the whirlwind
that is a whirlwind when dull, which is like a swirling
sloshy toilet after 5 hours on the line, I need the sweet
relief of FOCUS. And so I focus on the purity, the line
to heaven, of my hunger, and my fingers and I turn
into a vibration}

I took tap dancing lessons until I wasn’t shy anymore,
and I came out to the club and during the slamming
jackhammer beats did my tapdancing. Nobody could
hear my shoes so next time I brought a slab of flint to
tap on, and then I was the life of the party. Then I
became so good at tapdancing that I’m touring the
world and making a lot of money. I stopped to write
this book because people need to see the inner life of a
tapdancer}

One time I was out in the desert and I found a prickly
pear cactus. I had plenty of food and water with me,
so I left it alone. But I sat and admired the cactus
and had a kind of wordless dialogue with -it}

87

Here in the junkyard, I find myself always wandering
around, always wanting more. I love the junkyard. I
love the free and the cheap, the free and the ne¬
glected. There’s a history here and a depth, but I
want to know the junk in and of itself, in its living
present. I found a beautiful door lever from a car from
half a century ago, which I removed and took to my
house and glued to a board nailed to my wall:

One time I did cartwheels. It was really fun. I was at
summer camp. I was probably 9 or 10. At summer
camp, that summer camp, I mostly hung out with
girls. They taught me how to braid. I was the best girl
ever that summer, but then when I came home, and
tried to teach my brother how to braid, he looked at
me really seriously and said “Keep that stuff away
from me, if I learn that, who knows what will happen
to me.”

One time I was a talking squid and I found, deep in
the ocean, an anglerfish who didn’t know how to talk
yet. So I taught him some words of my squid lan¬
guage, and we began a long-term friendship. Nowa¬
days, as a human, I can’t speak Squid very well, but I
dive down in my submersible because I don’t have
anything better to do, and I wonder what could have
been:

Quitting while you’re ahead is good advice, as is quit¬
ting while you’re not too far behind. But the worst

thing you can possibly be is a quitter. So you have to
turn your quitting into winning. If you don’t do that,
then you’re a quitter, and that makes you a loser or
maybe even worse than a loser. Think about it: if you
try really really hard, some people will think well of
you, even if you fail. But on the other hand, if you try
really really hard and just fail, other people will think
you’re stupid. So just to keep things simple and to
protect yourself from feeling worthless, you should just
succeed, or in other words, win}

I once caused a river to flow out behind Grandfather
R.’s ranch. I just turned on the hose and let it flow.
Once I realized how awesome it was (after about 10
seconds), I went and got my brother and a couple of
my cousins. We had a blast, all morning long. Grand¬
father R. came back from riding around on his ATV,
tending to his animals and plants, and he said, “Oh
my children, the tears of the lovers of the earth, flow¬
ing out onto the earth, are sometimes wasted for the
pleasure of men.” He did not stop us for a long time,
but watched with sadness the many details of his ero¬
sion}

I’m riding in a biplane about 80 or 90 years ago, with
a famous aviatrix, we will be landing on some clouds
shortly, to meet with the elfs and fairies, who make
this their final retreat. I think I should be back after
we hammer out a diplomatic agreement with them,
about twenty minutes ago, on the afternoon of the
16th of July, 20—. We hope everything goes well}

89

Time is slowing down, as I loft up at the top of the
arc, I am in the hang time, I am sewing like crazy,
weaving and building, time is humming, and while I
could be pinned down, as some sort of slowness purees
me, right now I am approaching some amazing discon¬
tinuity. This is the part of the song where they add
layers and layers of synthesizers, grimy and complex,
and the brass joins and is obliterated, the part of the
song where all the frequencies lose their colors, and
there is nothing to see:

I caught a fish today, while sitting in silence, thinking
of everything going on in my life. Oh, the lazy river,
the old river, no hurry and no worry, doing nothing.
Oh, how the day melts away in boredom, how it drips
out of my brain, sweats out onto the fishing rod, leaks
into the river, to join the great river of bored sweat,
as it meanders through the braids of this crazy
swamp, as the tents and the shelters are buffeted by
the wind, the wind which ceases as I notice it, the salt
cedars melting into nothing as I realize they’re an in¬
vasive species;

I washed my hair today, which is something I do every
seven weeks as part of my agreement with my reli¬
gious leader. He tells me what to do every seven

90

weeks, when I meet up with him. I wash my hair ev¬
ery seven weeks in order to remind myself that I am a
dirty person, but when things line up, I am clean.

This is something that I experience in reverse in my
relationships — reverse, in that, I don’t have to be re¬
minded of it, it’s my daily experience, things get grad¬
ually greasier between me and my girlfriend (not S.)
until at some point we clear things up with some kind
of terrifying death-spiral, and then we are clean, and
the sky is calm and only has beautiful clouds, the cu¬
mulus clouds that float by and look like sheep}

Every day, when I get up, I thank God for all he has
given me and then I go to bed, especially thankful
that I don’t need to eat anymore and nobody has any
ambitions for me}

I am free-falling from an airplane high over the desert
valley where my cousins live and I suppose I will
probably survive, we’ll see. It is the 16th of July, the
afternoon of that day, the year of 20—.

I find that in myself there is the belief that all people,
including myself, are temporary, we are all beautiful
flowers, to be scorched or plucked or uprooted when
we have gone to seed. When people die, there is no in¬
justice in it, only the fading pain of a limb that’s been

91

removed, no residual sadness, no regret)

I imagine God, at the end of time, just for me, snuff¬
ing everything out in a beautiful way, for the sake of
the beauty I love so much, just for me, but for every¬
one else, the Christian who wants to roil in endless
pleasantness, the atheist who fears in animal terror
the approach of non-being and insignificance, he will
provide eternal life, for them, those people who loved
life so much)

I remember when I was fresh out of college, all I
wanted to do was new things, but now as the dean of
the school, I have learned to find a whole new world of
novelty whenever any little thing changes: suppose a
new faculty member joins a committee, or we hold a
meeting at night that we used to hold in the
daytime)

You know that everything is a figment of your imagi¬
nation, right? All of reality is either your conscious¬
ness or your subconscious. Everybody knows that.

How interesting, all the particular things in your
world)

At the nutmeg bar, they have heavy hour, with extra
gloom and air conditioning. They have people come in
and read impenetrable and brutal and beautiful
books. People flirt by breaking up, and the windows
fog up from everyone’s breath)

92

Jesus handed off his cross to Simon of Cyrene, who
was burdened with something glorious. The best frag¬
ments of the relic of the True Cross are those which
have a little of Simon’s sweat on them:

I am a little teapot, short and stout. When I get all
steamed up, watch out! I might tip over and spill the
tea on you. But I don’t get steamed up very often.
Normally the heat goes away for some magical reason
(somebody turned it off? My stove doesn’t work?) and
I just kind of calm down)

One time, I went to the barbershop and sat there
reading a magazine for a long time. It was one of
those gossip magazines. Oh, to learn all those details,
and to see those photographs. It was fascinating, com¬
pelling, engrossing. My barber forgot about me and I
forgot about him, until it was closing time. At that
point, I knew all there was to know about the gossip
of all these magazines I was reading. I had achieved
something with my day.-

I have asked before what is the meaning of being. It is
a good question to ask, if it is even possible to ask.
Can being ask about being? Does it have a right to?

Is it metaphysically possible? But I am a passionate,
desirous youth, I am a naive and demanding teenager,
I am full of life and desire, and so I tend to ask the
question out of my need although I have no rights, al¬
though it is completely impossible, I want God’s an¬
swer. Like a reflection on a moonlit-lake, this is my

93

treasured locket of hair from the voice of God: deny
yourself, take up your cross, and follow me:

It is the sober morning of a drunken night, it is the
17th of July, 20—.

I once purchased a clock to put on my living room
wall. We have guests over a lot, so we want to have a
way to know what time it is. This clock was cheap,
with a kind of translucent white plastic rim, and black
numbers and dials on a white background. As the
guests got used to our punctuality, eventually we did
not have to mention the time, and eventually we did
not have to look at the clock. And then there came a
time that we would want our guests to stay, and they
would say “No, no, there’s something we have to do”
although the truth of the matter was that they were
just going to go out to their cars and feel numb for 20
minutes or three quarters of an hour, and then drive
home to their actual, authentic, demands'.-

Sitting on the countertop, I have a pie cooling off. I’ve
been into pies for probably at least three months now.
There’s something I love about putting things to¬
gether, of preparation, of the slow-paced life. I would
like to invite some people over, where from, I do not
know. It is 11AM on a Saturday morning, and I am

94

tempted to go out into the street to round up some
teenage ruffians to honor this pie}

There was a lightning storm the other day, and I
looked out my windows, with the hiccups, watching
lightning hit other people’s houses and barns, far
away, hearing later of the fires that were started,
wracked with convulsions of the diaphragm, being
more than I usually do}

Hunger is a blessing. I remember back when I wasn’t
hungry, I lost so much weight that they had to put
rocks in my pockets so I wouldn’t blow away. I lost so
much weight that one time my mother didn’t even
hear what I had to say. I lost so much weight that a
cricket made me lose my balance. I lost so much
weight that when the ambulance came, they paid me
to pick me up and put me on the gurney}

You have no idea all of the things I’ve gone through,
and by the same token, I have no idea all of the things
you’ve gone through. We can try to talk about them,
and let’s even suppose you’ve lost your father like I’ve
lost my father: but it doesn’t even really matter if
we’ve had the same experience, objectively, it doesn’t
even really matter if we felt exactly the same things,
when we talk, we are not connecting}

I lived in a barn all summer, and it smelled. But I got
to eat all the fruit I wanted to. This is the pattern of
life, you tend to have to put up with something unde-

95

sir able in order to get something desirable. However,
then there was the summer that I lived at home,
watching cartoons, eating as much fruit as I wanted,
not smelling like animals. And that summer, I was so
bored, I almost puked out my eyeballs. But then there
was the summer I got turned into a reverberating, vi¬
brating string, being played by a master violinist, in
concert halls and out in country barn dances, and that
was all good, but I had to be a string. But then there
was the summer that never ended)

The bell tolls the death of the morning, afternoon is
birthed and cries, it is the 17th of July, 20—.

Day has fallen, and I walk in the garden and there it
is: a yellow-and-black butterfly, as wide-winged as the
palm of my hand is wide. My wife (not S.) calls out to
me, I go inside, do some taxes, write some bills, we
have an argument, make up, I start to make dinner,
she’s all sweet and takes over, I go outside, and take a
load off. Now where did that butterfly go?

Bone on bone, you need a knee replacement. I knew I
shouldn’t have exercised when I was younger. I knew
it all along. I should have signed my body over to the
VAT Corporation, to be turned into a human slug. I
should have had my consciousness uploaded to the In-

96

tercloud. I should have become more than myself. I
should have transcended myself and overcome myself.

I should have let the earth be inherited by the meek,
and conquered the stars like a mam

Dairy products give some people digestive problems,
but I’ve always found them to be a delicious element
in the meals that I eat. If I want to add a sense of
wonder to my food, I can use cheese. If I want my
food to slide down my throat, I can use milk. If I want
to add something around the edges, I can use butter.
And I can dip my bread in buttermilk, and pour yo¬
ghurt on my cereal, and have ice cream for dessert’.-

I’ve worn shoes for much of my life. There was a pe¬
riod where I did not, however. During those fateful 8
months, I was walking throughout town, trying to see
how tough my feet could be. I would walk on hot as¬
phalt, and on rough sidewalk. I decided to go for a
long walk into the mountains, from the center of town
straight north on Mountain Street, until I got to the
mountains. As I walked, I found myself getting little
rocks underfoot, and I got blisters. When I got to the
top, I bathed my feet in Town Springs, so that all of
you below could taste my victory, if ever so faint-ly-

Arugula is one of my favorite vegetables, I like its bit¬
ingness. I like it when it goes to seed, that’s how much
I like it. I like it when it teaches me something and
even when it doesn’t, that’s how much I like-it:

97

A hawk flew by where I was sitting just now and I
curse my luck. He or she will surely disturb the ani¬
mals in the field that lies before me, and my chances
as a hunter have diminished. Little do I know that a
vulture is watching me, biding his or her time’.-

When you run a race, you are never supposed to look
behind you. You are supposed to strain toward what
is ahead. This is good advice, yet because it is so well
known, when my brother designed the course for the
regional cross-country race, he made the loops so that
at certain points, you were always tempted, always
made aware of the people behind you:

There’s a certain kind of effort in life, which leaves a
person exhausted. There’s a certain ebb and flow of
intentionality. If you are who you want to be, then
there’s a penalty, that you have to be who you don’t
want to be for a while. Blessed is the person who can
receive a new nature from God’.-

The train is leaving the station, but I am not going to
get on it. It is going to a place that I don’t need to go
to. I have sent my children there to get an education,
but I do not need to go there. I have sent my dog
there to get neutered, but today, it is not the place I
am going. It is time to take an infinite nap, on the af¬
ternoon of the 17th of July, 20—.

98

It felt really nice to say that things were tentative the
first time I said it. A really comfortable feeling. And
then we made plans which worked out. In fact, I
ended up doing the thing that I wanted to do tenta¬
tively, the thing I started to commit to, and the peo¬
ple I was trying to please, but not commit to prema¬
turely, were pleased)

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for the bell tolls for
thee. Thou mayest ask for whom the donkey brays, or
for whom the midwife sings. But ask not for whom
the bell tolls. Thou must know at all times that all of
us are together, a continent rammed together by the
forces of the lower earth, we are a land on which one
nation sprouts up, one force and one gravity lend its
ordering principle. Ask not for whom the bells toll, for
the bells toll for thy father and thy mother, when they
toll for my father and my mother. Ask not, thou child,
for whom the bell tolls, for thy life is still fresh in thy
hands)

We sat up in the garrison, as bored as possible, play¬
ing cards. We played poker, and rummy, and as the
night wore on, Crazy Eights and 52 Pickup, and fi¬
nally we settled into the philosopher’s game, the
man’s game, War)

Strings of cheese, peeling off into the summer air,
floating and multiplying, settling on plates, whisked

99

by elfin labor toward our waiting paradise-tables, we
lie back and ponder nothing, and devour the strings of
cheese, and eat raisins and whitebread sandwiches of
mayonnaise, ham, and cheese, and then we have some
potato salad but decide not to finish -it;

One time my sister-in-law, this was back when we
were in junior high, told an inconvenient truth to my
mother. She told her that I was lying about my report
card, that actually I had gotten an A in every subject,
no Bs. My mother was pleased, but puzzled, and I was
stuck with her pleasure and her surprise, wishing that
I could have kept my affairs to myself.-

I have three kinds of money in my pocket. I have the
money of this country, the pound, the money of the
neighboring country in my pocket, the dollar, and I
have money from a board game. I am blind and I
never really know which is which, and it seems that
everyone will accept any kind of money, but I feel dif¬
ferent inside when I end up telling the truth:

I feel the call of my laundry as I experience a summer-
long laundry day on this 17th of July, 20—.

This feeling of awakeness and aliveness that I have
and can’t explain is simply my gratitude for the infin-

100

ity of bad things that haven’t happened to me or my
kin}

My nation was left in ruins, without leaders, as we
starved, as we used up the last of our fertilizer and en¬
tered the end times. And the three hated dictators,
which had each hated, and in succession deposed, each
of their lying eminences, gathered in their late middle
age to reminisce, and to consider what was the mean¬
ing of life}

I came upon my dictators, and the conversation
turned to me. “Now here’s a lad with promise. If only
he had come of age in my regime, he could have made
a superb underchamberlain.” “Indeed, but I think he is
more, Secretary of War material.” “You think so? So it
may be, but I would have had him as Vice
President.”

I was flattered, but somehow preferred the discussion
my three ex-girlfriends had had in my absence, in
which they quickly agreed on what was unpromising
about me and mercifully turned to other, irrelevant or
mundane, expressions of their love for each other}

I am unhappy and I don’t care — a beautiful combi¬
nation. I don’t care that I am unhappy, that is the
beautiful part. The unhappy part is that I don’t have
any energy. The happy part is that I’m okay with be¬
ing unhappy. The not-okay part is that I could be liv¬
ing. The not-caring part is that I am living, and I can

101

use my energy, the energy that I have, to some ex¬
tent)

Our corporation was a responsible adult, it had de¬
pendents, it couldn’t just disband, and yet it did and
my brother and I went our separate ways, moving to
different cities. We stayed in touch, of course, but not
as much as before we incorporated)

I’m so tired that I desire greatly to sleep, and yet that
desire is so great that it rolls over to the account of
tiredness of the next day, and in the long run, my
habit of sleeping is tending to increase my fatigue.
God, my body, my sad, aging body, my worn-down
and beautifully eroded self)

And we crowd, my brother, my sister-in-law, S., and I,
in a culvert underneath a road, a pedestrian under¬
pass, knowing that this is the tragic, shaking end of
the lives we loved, we longed for and invested in, that
what will come is a devastation stretched out in time,
that life will be a flaming sun, a dirge of fire, it will be
a barrenness and a heavy struggle and the end of all
hope. And as we all four of us continue to live, refuse
to die — or continue to live without even making a re¬
fusal, we will get into a rhythm, all of our sad and
bereft thoughts, all our longings in decay, all of our
sighs and heavy footsteps, this rhythm, plodding,
ringing, never any less brutal, wasted or sad, will es¬
tablish, will establish us somewhere, will grow and as¬
sert, will assert us through time until we have at-

102

tained a look in the eye, something expressed only
subtly by the eye, and by our steadfastness; this faint
joy from a universe in which we cannot understand
anything we see, in which our beings are incompatible
with relation and apprehension — in which yet, now,
we four are unintelligibly alive}

S. and I were talking about the way things will be. I
told her, “If they tell you that you have half as much
food every week, what will you do?” and she was sad
for a minute and said “I don’t know” and I said “Okay,
but what will you do?” And she said “I don’t know,
other than, starve.” And I said “I will have to learn
what hunger really means, as well.”

It is deep into the night and I have either been work¬
ing too hard, or have been unemployed too long, or
have had too much fun, or am completely normal, in
possession of my best faculties. It is still the 17th of
July, 20—.

When I was learning to drive stick-shift, my sister-in-
law (not yet my sister-in-law) was always trying to tell
me to relax, just move the gears together smoothly,
don’t peel out so much. But now, there are no gears,
the cars don’t run, we try to walk places, under the
hot of the sun, under the smoky haze}

103

“If we’re going to get through this,” I said to my sis¬
ter-in-law, my brother, and S., “I have no idea what
we’re going to have to think.” And S. was silent, look¬
ing to my brother and my sister-in-law and me, and
my brother said, “We must think of something, some
hope.” “Of heaven,” said my sister-in-law, so officially.

I said “Let us live there, and also live in hell on earth
— heaven and hell both.”

What are the instructions for lightning? You don’t re¬
ally want to get hit by lightning. What do you do? Do
you walk right under trees? But then the lightning
will hit you when it hits the tree. Or do you walk out
in the open? Then you are the tallest thing, it’s like
you’re the tree:

Everything left behind, I walked along alone, some¬
times hallucinating that I saw S. beside me, or my
brother walking behind me. I did find my sister-in-law
there, how strange. We looked around at the doors
that opened into nothing, the piles of rocks that gave
off a presence of heat, the ruins of skeletons, the
downed powerlines, and said to each other “Why were
we chosen, why were we the ones, why was it our gen¬
eration, where is everyone else, how long can we go
without water?”

I remember what it was like to sit beside a cool spring
of water up in the mountains, to splash my face with
water, to bungee jump off a bridge, and to then sit

104

down and see the grains of sand fall from one half of
the hourglass to the other.-

S. and my sister-in-law went out looking for something
to eat, trying to observe which of the weeds were more
or less edible, which of the mushrooms were the edible
kind, the kind we had seen other people eating, trying
to find animals that were still alive in case it was time
to do the irrevocable deed. They found a can of tuna,
a strange thing, an old and yet still good can of tuna,
and we had a feast, and then said our prayers, and lay
around the campfire, listening to the crickets singing,
and knew that we could make it at least until tomor¬
row.-

The four of us lived through the Black Death. I was
the gravedigger, my brother the doctor, S. was a nun
and my sister-in-law was a tavern-keeper, and we all
worked with the bodies, whether sick or well or dead.
We knew the human body back then, and we brought
this to remembrance whenever we needed to, in the
city of the 21st century-

I remember that day well, the day of flowers and but¬
terflies, of sunshine and beautiful clouds, the day of
seeing everything in bloom and knowing everything in
decay-

“My brain feels like oatmeal.” exclaimed S. I remember
the look on her face, her furrowed brow, her eyes
sunken and her cheeks closer to bone. “Yes,” I said.

105

And we worked a little bit longer in the bread line,
giving out food to our fellow poor, and then as we
stepped away, both of us light-headed from hunger, we
almost pulled each other over as we walked away, and
someone from somewhere gave us half of a little loaf of
bread to share}

It is a brilliant afternoon, jets flying across the sky,
leaving marks in the atmosphere. It is the 18th of
July, 20—.

Oh, delicious sleep, stealing over me... my stomach in
knots from hunger, but my mind at ease, just a few
more weeks and it will all be over. The incomparable
beauty of the next life, the beauty of a new body and
a new job, and me here lying on the ground, the suf¬
fering falling over me like a beautiful and bitter blan¬
ket, the sun turning me languid, just a little bit more
and my sister-in-law drags herself over to me and
kicks me in the side. “Get up, you lazy dog. Come on.
We found a spring.”

And I can remember how my bed felt, back at home,
the way the mattress was so soft and cool as I lay
down on it, the clean sheets, the way that only clean
sheets can feel, my pillow, especially for me, the blan¬
ket, the light of the room dialed down to where I

106

could keep my eyes closed, the house quiet, even the
traffic mostly gone home to put its feet up. The way I
used to sleep. I remember even what it was like to
sleep, all those dreams I used to have. I dreamed of
strange but perfect houses, places to explore, I
dreamed of rooms added on to the house I knew, the
house I had for the last 3 years lived in, in which I
had invested my soul, had new rooms, strange places
where I could find things, I can remember how my
head would hum with thoughts of things I had done
or had yet to do, I remember how sleep was a good
friend, a reasonable friend, who came up to me in the
night time and tucked me in, and then I woke up to a
fresh day of learning... Ah, I remember sleep. And
now sleep is something else to me}

I followed a few years after Livingstone into Africa. I
was a veterinarian, a scientist looking after cattle. I
had heard of the tsetse fly, of the sleeping sickness,
and it struck me there in Africa, the sun whipped me
down and the flies made me sick. The sun held my
hand and gently led me to the ground, hours and
hours more as time went on}

I found this half-eaten pizza pie one day and it was
quite delicious. I thanked God for that, and I shared
the pieces of it with the people nearby, in hopes that
they could sleep a little better that night. I hope that
you have not had to try to go to sleep on an empty
stomach recently}

107

I tell you, I was not particularly interested in entering
into God’s rest until recently. I would have preferred
entering into his important service, his bureaucracy or
business. I would have preferred all the flesh of this
life, all the vividness and obviousness, the substantial¬
ity, that which to chew upon. But now, I am ready for
God’s rest}

We found a doctor the other day. He was out of sup¬
plies, but he had good advice. We found a lawyer the
other day. He had nothing much to tell us. We found
a banker the other day — dead. We found a pastor
the other day, looking for what to do next. We found
a musician the other day, beating the side of a house,
singing the blues. We found a truck driver the other
day, drunk on old wine}

It is the humming evening of the 18th of July, 20—.

One night, after bashing our brains out against a dy¬
ing bureaucracy, S. wanted to go to bed, to curl up
underneath her own particular pile of old blankets in
the springtime cold, but instead I thought we should
pray, commit our starvation to the Lord, watching
down on us in his own tearing hunger. She said “OK,
but just for 5 minutes”, which, in more prosperous
times, I would have analyzed, but tonight, I would

108

have what I could with the people in my life)

When one of us got sick, the other 3 of us would take
turns sitting up with him or her, sometimes all to¬
gether. My sister-in-law, when she got a terrible fever,
was wasted in bed, wanted to have some fun, but too
weak to play Crazy Eights, simply listened to us play
and joined in our game of War by being Fate — giv¬
ing the final shuffle of the cards)

One time we found a house full of food, canned food,
good cans, somehow untouched by all the hungry peo¬
ple, and we sat for weeks, the last people alive on
earth, waiting for some kind of rescue, for death, fill¬
ing in our time, as I had; we had starved to death al¬
ready, we were the luckiest people on earth)

Early on, my niece and nephew were sent to live in a
safe place that was accidentally bombed and my
brother and sister-in-law still had a lot of tears left to
give)

S. actually died when one of the great nuclear powers
attacked, launching a war in the midst of a flowering
of culture. My sister-in-law actually died in the Great
Tribulation, as she had not been raptured. My brother
actually died when the asteroid hit, and I actually
died when the wind went out of my sails)

It is the evening, the melted evening, the mellow
evening, of the 18th of July, 20—.

109

Now everyone has their place, everyone has their time.
I worked hard throughout my career to understand
the interests of all those in my care, to work toward
their good, to put them on good projects, to see to
their development. Some people thought I was a fair
leader, some unfair, and while in a past life, I would
have cared whether or not I cared what people
thought, in this life, I continue to care, but no longer
make the judgment that I need to not care if people
thought I was fair'.-

Ordering pizza works about the same as it always did.
You just get on your smartphone, or, if you don’t have
a smartphone, your dumbphone, or, if you don’t have
a dumb phone, your pay phone, or, if you don’t have a
pay phone, you send an email, or if, if you’ve run out
of emails for the month you get on your bicycle, or if
you don’t have a bicycle, you take the bus, or if you
lost your bus pass you just have to walk: but the key
thing is that you communicate, in some concrete way,
what it is you want out of your pizza!

I talked to a man who lived on the streets. He said
that he was just out there for a little bit until he
needed to get a job. I asked him if he thought he

110

needed a job now. He said, “No, people will take care
of me” and I said “Do you take care of people?” and he
said “My day will come.” and I said “Your day has
come.” and marched him to my office, where I intro¬
duced him to the cripple who would be his son}

Sometimes I relax out by the pool. I am a big fan of
swimming, but also a big fan of relaxing. In our train¬
ing, we learn how to relax, to relish our relaxing, but
then get up just the instant we have relaxed for long
enough, and are now ready to get back to work}

Sometimes I go on holiday, up to the mountains of the
center of the north of the land I grew up in. And up
in the mountains I receive visions}

I have spent time riding the rails, teaching and writ¬
ing and playing guitar, singing like an old time rail-
rider, getting off at small towns to spend some time at
the civic center, building some small thing}

One time, I met S. by chance — these days, we always
meet by chance — in an ice cream parlor in the west
of the city we both grew up in, over on 8th Street
near Hawk Avenue. The little ice cream parlor had a
wooden bench up against a wall, a half-booth, you
might say, and there she was, working away on her
laptop. I walked up to her and said “S., what are you
doing here?” And she said “Oh, you found me.”

I can’t believe how much I enjoy food now. I am

111

thankful for everything I eat. I don’t eat any more
than I used to, but it’s just amazing how much flavor
there is in everything. God is good to us, to speak
such poems to us:

One time I met a wicked man. I couldn’t believe the
lies he was telling — which is a welcome change over
my past self. I used to eat up lies like they were
candy, living in a perpetual state of holding onto
things that I should have let go, resisting but holding
the temptation close; actually, that was good training,
for something that I can’t put into words'.-

I see people struggling in their lives all the time, and
it gives me such love to talk to them. I don’t under¬
stand where this love comes from, it must be a change
in the weather or the climate. And when I talk to
them, sometimes they listen, and sometimes they
don’t, and a lot of times they listen and they know
what I’m saying but it just isn’t their time to lose the
chain}

I am surrounded by chirping crickets, lying out under¬
neath the stars, being eaten by mosquitos, while lis¬
tening to the frogs out in the trees while a cool air
flows off the lake on the 18th of July, 20—.

112

It was an important moment when I realized I needed
to love my brother like he was myself. I needed to
identify what it was I needed, what I wished I could
get from a relationship with someone who was already
truly like me, and then to seek it in a brother who
was unlike me}

I remember one time, at the school cook-out, I went
to go get a bag of chips, after I had my hamburger
and cole slaw, but what I really wanted was to go in¬
side where there was air conditioning}

A dust devil woke up out in the dusty fields, where we
had stopped irrigating because of the waste of water,
and it skipped around meaninglessly until it blew dust
in my face and picked the hat off my head. Truly, like
all devils, it was concerned with making itself my real¬
ity;

I remember back in the days when sleep was in short
supply, my brother would always try to take a nap,
but I would wake him up, tell him his girlfriend was
on the phone, and while his relationships flourished, I
got to have all his sleep}

One time, on the planet Venus, there was so much
acid rain that we stayed home from school and played
with our melty lead. In those days, people on Venus
tended to wear giant protective space suits}

A dragon was living under our house, until our father

113

called up Grandfather R. for advice. Grandfather R.
said “Does he speak ill of our Beloved? Then leave him
alone, you know not why God has placed him
there.”

Alopecia runs in the family. I believe I remember what
that term means. I know that we tend to lose our hair
as we get older. Some of us in the family have become
less attractive with age, which, paradoxically, corre¬
lated with our romantic successes, our successful part¬
nerships to the point of marriage’.-

Some days I am as tired as a turtle, and I simply have
to pack my things in my backpack and keep walking,
because this path will remain here until I do. I get out
on the path when I am able, and the dust remains on
the ground until I disturb it. I am the one to leave
footprints in the dirt, I am the one to complete this
journey, on this path that is not mine to blaze for the
first time, but which is instead so incredibly ancient,
it destroys everyone’s memories and reaches back be¬
hind everyone’s memories and just leaves me tired,
tired, tired:

A gentleman and a lady that I once knew threw a
party for the whole vicinity. I arrived with S., the two
of us brother and sister somehow, and there we sat
with all of the polite people, harboring suspicions
about each other. Nothing but suspicion, and polite¬
ness, and dullness, and senseless jokes. Oh what a
beautiful evening, to be among people for once)

114

There was a time I figured out how to live in a grey
cloud. I don’t remember precisely how, this was sev¬
eral centuries ago, but I think it involved some kind of
balloon and a little gondola. Yes, the commute down
to work could be considerable, so I tended not to
work, catching birds instead, and doing my paintings,
looking down at the landscape, the ant-people, and up
at the clouds, my surroundings. What caused me to
leave this idyllic setting? I learned everything I needed
to learn from solitude’.-

I hope none of you ever finds yourself driving drunk,
pulled over, in there overnight, at the courthouse,
lacking a license, on the bus, finding the love of your
life, getting married, building a satisfying life, and
then dying at a ripe old age, surrounded by children
and grandchildren. Actually, now that I get all of that
out, it sounds like it might be a good thing)

There are three ways a film can end. I am speaking of
the moment in which the film is over, that most bru¬
tal of cuts. As in the horror-comedy-mockumentaries,
the camera could be possessed by a demon, thrown off
a cliff, thrown on the ground in terror, etc. In this
case, the end of the film’s footage has a reason within
the universe of the movie itself. Then, as in the absur¬
dist, brutal-art, tradition, the end of the film could
have nothing at all to do with the inner logic of the
movie. Perhaps the director would even end the film
arbitrarily, not allowing himself or herself to make the

115

final cut. And then, as is the case with most movies,
the ending of the film could have some strange corre¬
lation with the action of the him, there would be a fit¬
tingness between the one and the other}

There is a hood through the river valley, and my
brother is demanding that I go help. “Come on, you
talk a lot about how much you love our town. Now
it’s time to help. Get up.” And yet strangely enough I
don’t care. I wonder why that -is}

An intense anger of hail comes down on the roof of
our shack, and we sit in silence, allowing prayer to
come to us. It is the 19th of July, 20—.

Perhaps it is true that every day, when all of us came
home from work, all of us were so tired, so stressed-
out and exhausted, that we could only spare enough
of our effort, if we were parents, to barely allow our
children their deserved amount of flourishing and hap¬
piness, and, if we were single, just enough of what it
took to get us into situations in which we could free
our minds from our worries, at bars, at restaurants,
movie theaters and on the couches of our friends’ liv¬
ing quarters. And in that there is a reason to
mourn}

116

Just now, I find myself walking around outside, look¬
ing at what has happened. I believe there was an
earthquake while I slept, I see everything is askew. I
know that some people would have paid better atten¬
tion as they slept, would have sensed some reason to
wake up, but for me, it’s always more important to
cease to exist, to be in another world, to attend to my
own needs, rather than attend to reasons to fear}

I walked in a friend’s garden the other day, looked at
all the items she had set out to decorate it. I saw a
gnome, a clown, a dog, a goat, and a sundial, all made
out of painted concrete. Her garden was a sad relic of
its old days, when we had enough water for trees. I re¬
member that she had beds of flowers in the old days.
(This friend knew S. when they were in elementary
school. I only found this out a long time after I met S.
completely at random.) She came outside and joined
me, with a cup of lemonade. “Well, what do you
think?” I didn’t say anything for a minute and she un¬
derstood}

I was in an island territory, out in an archipelago on a
foreign sea, enjoying my vacation, when I received a
message that called me back home, cut short my re¬
laxation. It was a decree from the governor of my
state, saying that citizens of the state must remain in
the state. That even the neighboring states could not
be trusted. I knew that I had a choice, to stay away
for ever or to come home forever. And though I am a
wanderer and a stranger, I knew where my heart lay,

117

to wander and be estranged in my own hometown)

Chronic pain started to get into our joints as the
weather progressed, this weather of pain, this weather
of feelings, that swept in, a pain front on the joint
coast of our nations, along with a kind of humid mind,
a humidity on the mind ward cape. And so all of us ex¬
hibited the same symptoms at the same time, solidar¬
ity

There was a great controversy in our day: high fruc¬
tose corn syrup vs. cane sugar. No one was particu¬
larly in favor of high fructose corn syrup, rather, the
controversy was between those who said there was a
difference, and that cane sugar was better, and those
who said that there was no difference. Similarity: both
were sugars. Some differences: they were made in dif¬
ferent ways, and contained somewhat different types
of sugar molecules)

One time I was eating a lemon cake and the waiter
came out and said “Oh, I’m so sorry, sir, we’ve served
you the lime cake” and I said “Really? This tastes like
a lemon cake to me.” And the waiter said “Oh no,
we’ve been out of lemons all day, I’m so sorry that I
didn’t think to mention it to you.” And I felt like I
had seen a ghost)

When I feel dry, I’m not sure if I’m being funny about
everything, or if there’s no reason to feel emotions, or
both, or neither. Do you see what I’m saying? My dry

118

sense of humor is so understated, that I don’t know if
I’m making a joke out of everything, or I have no feel¬
ings and make no joke, or something combining the
two. When my sense of humor is so dry, or, I am feel¬
ing so dry, I do not know how to listen to myself.-

I've never crashed a helicopter, yet, I do not believe I
have ever flown a helicopter in waking life. I have
heard that flying a helicopter is difficult. You have to
keep the whirlybird level enough, you have to keep at
a low enough altitude but then again not too low. I
don’t think I could ever in a million years fly a heli¬
copter, because by then there won’t be any more fuel
left)

There is some semblance of truth and reality on peo¬
ple’s faces, and I just kind of latch onto that and then
I believe them. I think it’s okay for other people to
not believe other people, but for me, I have to believe
people. This is something I’m learning to suppress in
myself, so that I can be like everyone else:

The wind blows in from another quadrant, and brings
with it a swarm of flies, which settle on everything,
and take their nourishment, and leave us, alone and in
pain. It is the unexpectedly late afternoon of the 19th
of July, 20—.

119

There are different kinds of fears. The fear of being
alone, of losing your life, of losing your soul, your
truth, your voice, your possessions, your status, com¬
fort and health. We are ruled by our fears, even when
we don’t feel them}

I'm considering moving to a different part of our is¬
land nation. There is a community toward the north
of our island, where I have heard that people like me
are common. It is a place like an iron furnace, that de¬
stroys or refines. I want to be refined, but more than
that, destroyed}

I spent an afternoon fishing one time. It was very re¬
laxing, boring even. Yet, a compelling experience, the
moment the fish hit the line. This fish that I caught
was big, a foot long. I took my time cleaning it, to ob¬
serve what its organs were. I was on a science trip in
the third grade}

What do I want to do? I never know the answer to
that question. Sometimes I know what it is I am do¬
ing, or have just done. I observe what is, not what
should be. Sometimes I find myself in relationships in
which I observe what is, not what should be}

There’s someting very strange about the way that my
sister-in-law thinks about me. I am either here or
there, never in between. I am either tall or short,
never medium height. I either owe her something or

120

am owed something by her. Very strange for someone
like her to be thinking so much of someone like me}

I loaded all of my things into a large backpack and set
off across the eastern Northern Valley, searching for
small communities of people. In our beautiful and
prosperous nation, the small communities are harder
and harder to find. They tend to become large com¬
munities, or to die out. I needed a small community
because I needed to find a place to put down roots,
because the purpose of a community is to serve the
needs of the individuals who visit -it}

It is the most joyous day of our nation, and we are fir¬
ing off rockets into the air. These rockets explode like
the way our hearts explode, a huge joy, a death that
we survive. I am proud of our nation, of all the ways
in which it has lumbered on, I am proud of the big
pile of rivets that holds so many people together, and
I shudder to think of-it}

Back when I was shrunk down to the size of my own
full-sized-self’s thumb, I rode on the back of a crow
and discovered how they get around, where they con¬
gregate. I could have seen this just as a full-sized self,
but I never really paid attention}

I am looking through the lens of a microscope, down
at a sample taken from a pond. Look! There’s an
amoeba, chasing a paramecium. The paramecium rows
away. Good going, paramecium! But the amoeba, re-

121

maining where it is, is perfectly placed for when the
paramecium turns around toward it again. Which will
happen? Will the hunter devour the prey? Or will the
prey escape until another day? Either outcome is en¬
tertaining}

There’s a pebble in my shoe, which realizes me that
it’s getting dark, which reminds me that I’m supposed
to be home before dark or else I will get in trouble,
this 19th of July, 20—.

When I was a little kid, I tried to be charming. I tried
to be funny, witty, agreeable. I am tempted, in my
older age, to say “What a waste. What good ever
came of those things?” And yet I observe myself, with
my nieces and nephews, responding more to my
charming 15-year-old nephew, and I find myself teach¬
ing him all the ways that will someday set his face
and make him cry}

Broccoli was always my favorite vegetable growing up,
putting the cheese sauce on it, sprinkling the cayenne
pepper on it, eating it in one bite. Then, as I got
older, I realized, in a way that made me wonder why I
hadn’t thought of it before, that I could simply put
the cheese sauce, and cayenne pepper, and even the
red wine vinegar, on brussels sprouts}

122

I’ve often wondered about cortisone. It is supposed to
make your knee feel better for a few weeks. And then
your knee hurts again. What is the meaning of corti¬
sone? I don’t think you can take it all the time. If you
could, then what need would there be for other
painkillers, or surgery? It is said that cortisone works
like a charm.-

One time, when we were sentient vegetables, the farm¬
worker came into our hothouse and picked us. We
didn’t know what hit us. We were loaded onto crates,
and then the crates were loaded onto trucks, and the
trucks rode (but to us it was as though we were being
confused in the dark) on over to the processing plant,
and some of us were considered good, and some of us
were considered bad, and the good ones of us were
sent on to stores, and we wished we could have been
all together, all bad or all good, but that is not the
way of the world. We hoped that somehow these peo¬
ple selecting us, the one from the other, were wiser
than we were’.-

I’m trying to get the lid off the pickle jar, with my
weak hands, when someone I know comes to the door¬
bell — of course, I don’t know who it is yet — and I
think to myself “Well, I don’t know exactly what I will
say to that person. I sure hope it isn’t someone trying
to sell me something. Those people are really annoy¬
ing and I tend to shut the door in their faces. Just
kidding, I listen politely and then say I’m not inter-

123

ested. Hahaha. I crack myself up. Ugh. I think about
myself too much. Well, better do something here. If I
do something, then I won’t be thinking about myself,
thinking I’m all clever. Better put down this pickle jar
and go over and open the door.” So I go over, in my
sweats and t-shirt and gingerly open the door. And
standing there is my neighbor, who says, “Hey there,
my wife and I are having a cook-out in a few, wonder¬
ing if you wanted to come over?” “Do you need any
pickles? I’ve got a big old jar I’m trying to open.” My
neighbor was like “Yeah, pickle jars. I remember
those.” And I said, “Okay, I'll be over there soon.” I
went back to the pickle jar, and tried the trick where
you use a spoon as leverage, under the lid, to let out
the suction from the vacuum seal. “ShchPOP!” went
the lid, just as I needed it to)

I go over to the neighbor’s cook-out, and for like 45
minutes it’s just me and him and his wife, and we
make the smallest of small talk, and then a plane flies
overhead, and another and another. And we assumed
they were from the military base on the other side of
town, but then we saw jets coming out of nowhere,
trying to intercept them, but it was too late and that
my friends is how they got smallpox back into civiliza¬
tion)

Have you ever had a lightbulb that gave off light but
also heat? You need it for the light — you love it for
the light — but over time it just gives off so much
heat, on a cold night, you don’t mind, but on a hot

124

night, in order to read, you have to leave it on, heat¬
ing and heating, and there’s nothing you can do about
it, because we haven’t invented any artificial lights
that don’t give off heat}

It’s probably late enough to be alone, this strange
night of the 19th of July, 20—.

My eyes peeled a carrot, back when I was a magician.

I had trained for many years to be an illusionist, until
one day, my being broke into this other reality in
which I really had magickal powers. I made a lot of
money and made a lot of illusionists envious as I had
this power. I was in another world and I was in this
world. I was in the other world, but they were not,
and somehow they were in my world, although they
started to fade to me as my power grew greater and
greater. Well, the night I peeled a carrot with my
eyes, I was sitting alone in my apartment, wondering
why love had so long eluded me (it was several years
before I first met S.) and some lady friend of mine was
supposed to visit and there just wasn’t enough time
and I knew that punctuality was her middle name —
oh, so strange to be a person like me, with the tastes I
had in women. And I stared at the carrot and started
to weep, just a little, just with my eyes, and I started
to explode. And the carrot peeled itself. And the thing

125

is, I didn’t even need the carrot to be peeled, not for
the recipe I was working on. But it was okay, I could
still use the carrot. I put the carrot in the pot, and
made soup, and she arrived, and it was ready, and we
gazed into each others’ eyes, thinking of whatever it
was we would have thought if we were alone’.-

When I was in junior high, I took woodshop. We used
vices and saws and power drills. It was glorious. I
made a birdhouse out of pine wood. I burned patterns
on the outside with a magnifying glass, like a shark
and a penguin. I named me birdhouse “Cap’n O’ the
Seas” and talked about how only pirate birds were al¬
lowed in it. That it was actually a pirate ship, a pirate
ship for pirate birds. Oh, junior high! Those days of
high spirits and boundless creativity-

One time when I was looking for things for myself in
other peoples’ trash, I came across a dumpster with a
particularly terrible smell. The smell was so awful
that I actually smelled it not only with my nose, but
also sensed in some measure the intensity of it,
through my eyelids. It was a smell that was also a
heat. Inside the dumpster, there were hundreds of
boiled eggs, and hundreds of cans of spray paint, and
one bucket of chemicals that should have been dis¬
posed of at a hazardous waste site, so I thought,
something smelling of something indescribable, but
maybe like the smell that dumpsters habitually have,
the grease of the street trash, and also the smell of
fish. That was the second day that I almost died’.-

126

I sat down one evening with an English muffin and a
crumpet. It was a tired night, I had somehow gotten
through the day, and all I wanted to do was eat and
sleep, although I could tell that tonight would be a
night of jello golem insomnia. I looked at the one and
the other and could not tell which was which! This
was important because I had put butter on the one
and not on the other (on the other I put some other
oil), and I needed to have the buttery one first, it was
an iron law of my constitution. Then I had the bril¬
liant thought to smell the two, to see if I could smell
the butter. I tried, but they both smelled like butter.
So I bit into one, taking my life in my hands, and it
was not the buttery one! Somehow I got through that
night, hanging by a thread)

I have days where I feel like I am a phonograph
record, and something else is the needle, and I play
the same things over and over again, and the record
keeps going around forever, and every time through,
the needle wears me out a little bit more, a little less
detail in the widths of my groove, maybe getting
carved a bit deeper. And then there are the days
where — this is my universe — I am left out in the
sun and I warp, and I am totally ruined for life — and
this is also my universe — this has not in any way
been mitigated, but I, the record, keep turning, and
the needle keeps in the groove, and I continue to make
my appointed music, and I continue to await the next
time I am left out in the sun and completely obliter-

127

cited.-

If I can do just one productive thing each day, I con¬
sider that day a victory over the bed. Some people go
to bed at 10PM, others take it easy and go to bed at
9. That’s where I started, and things progressed, and
now I get out of bed at 8:30AM and usually take my
next hit of the mattress at 11:00AM — thank good¬
ness I’m not so far gone as to be a 10:30 sleeper. Not
that I exactly sleep as I lie in bed, I wouldn’t call it
that. I’m not really living when I’m alive. My produc¬
tive thing for today was writing this letter to you,
dearfS:

Here at the charity carnival, we have all lined up for
our elementary school, where our precious ones go to
become citizens of our nation, for better or for worse,
but we are here for the better, and they put all our
names into a giant barrel and turn it over and over —
a raffle. And names are drawn, every name is drawn,
this is a complete raffle, and they never draw mine,
and it turns out, as I look down at my hand, that my
ticket is in my hand, that I never put it in. How is it
that they would draw every name you ask? They were
assigning us our rank in the school, and so my chil¬
dren had no rank. My children were destined to be
perpetual outsiders, because I had been unable to per¬
form this very simple step toward securing their fu¬
ture. Better that they had had the lowest possible sta¬
tus, that they had been included on the bottom rungs
of the ladder, than that they remain apart from the

128

ladder.-

Our ship is calmed in the middle of a great and deep
ocean, there being just a bit of a current. We are
twisting into ourselves, avoiding the sun, constantly
asking what the time is, for only time can save us
now. It is not even noon, on the 20th of July, 20—.

One time, in the garbage factory, I wandered around
on my lunch break, as I was in the habit of doing, and
found a door, usually locked, that today was unlocked.
It led to a chamber with a ladder leading down to a
huge cellar, with a dirt wall on one side and such
strange things as fluorescent light bulbs and what ap¬
peared to me to be the poles used in street signs.

Down here was a smell of damp and moldy earth, in
contrast to the street-trash smell of the garbage fac¬
tory. Down here, it was damp and cool. Up there it
was hot and humid, from the moisture of the garbage.

I realized that this was not a place I was supposed to
be, so I resurfaced and closed the door. And over the
months that I continued to work there, I would always
try the door, and it was always locked, and when I left
that job, soon, I forgot about the door, although the
cellar was still there, always would be there, would al¬
ways, to me, be a compelling mystery.-

129

One time, back when I was a spider, I spent the better
part of a morning building an elaborate web. Then I
sat there, perfectly still, waiting for food to fly into it.
It’s strange, waiting for things to come to you that
have no incentive to come. They have to come by acci¬
dent. And you have to prepare so carefully, that when
you meet, you have to have differing expectations for
how the encounter is supposed to go}

I wiped the sweat off my brow, digging the trench
that I was supposed to dig, the latrine that I was sup¬
posed to deepen, which was all for the benefit of the
people that I was bonded to, my family in arms. And
in the midst of the toil, the heat got to me, and I fell
into this clean pit, this happy earth, and the earth
swallowed me up and I slept the sleep of death, re¬
ceived into my mother’s heart}

There’s a candy store I used to go to in my childhood,
a strange candy store that had familiar things like
peppermint and root beer sticks, but also strange
things, like horehound, and I figured out years later
that that candy store was really a recurring teacher, a
resounding note in the symphony of life, teaching me
to take my medicine}

Back when I was a gas molecule, I just flew around
and ran into things over and over again. I had so
much fun. Then, some spoilsport lowered the tempera¬
ture of the vessel I was in, until I couldn’t manage to
have as much fun, and I condensed on the side of the

130

vessel and dripped into a great collective. There, in
the collective, there was some sort of mixing, some
sort of vague hierarchy of temperature, some stratifi¬
cation, some claustrophobia. Then, some other joker
— some wonderful and terrible demigod — lowered
the temperature even further and I was locked into a
kind of ... I can’t describe-it:

S. was a little concerned today, when she saw me. She
asked “Are you OK? You look like you might need
some sleep or some help.” I said “No, I am not OK.
Thanks for asking. I don’t know what I need, but
please talk to me, because I like when you talk. You
always have so much to say.” So she and I walked
down Griffin Street, near 43rd Street, and observed all
the people walking by, the jugglers and homeless peo¬
ple and the street musicians, and the tourists and the
residents of the great big residential hotels that flatten
the shops beneath them. She saw one person in partic¬
ular that caught her eye, a woman with a sad face. I
knew who she was: at a different time of day, or
rather, in the night, she is a prostitute, but today she
is a mom with a kid, with dark circles under her eyes,
and an old hooded jacket on in the autumn cold. I
spoke to the woman, whom I had spoken with before,
and she said hello back to us. I asked her how her
daughter was and she said “She’s doing great. Thanks
for asking. She’s making friends at school.”

There’s an old trunk of secrets in my house where I
keep some of my favorite writings. I have letters here

131

that were sent from back when people still wrote let¬
ters. I have tax documents that fill me with a kind of
nostalgia for when I had enough money to have to hie
a tax return. I have journals and diaries — for my
eyes only. I have receipts that only mean something to
me — nothing to you, devoid of their context. I have
a recipe book for foods that only I find edible, and the
manual to a clock radio that I threw away a long time
ago, but which contains sentences in broken English
that I wish I could forget, but which I drink in, at
10:30 in the morning, wishing that I had the strength
to say “no”, but of course loving, in a way in which I
wasn’t loving myself, trading one misery for
another}

Three hours have passed, but the clock has only
chimed twice, this clock that chimes every 15 minutes.
It is the middle of the afternoon, but this lying clock
says that it hasn’t even struck noon, on the 20th of
July, 20—.

My sister-in-law, before she got too far out of college,
was trying to find a way to make money at her pas¬
sion, which was languages. She had double-majored,
in two different beautiful foreign languages, at the col¬
lege she went to. She was trying to figure out how she
could make money off of those foreign languages.

132

Translation? Interpretation? She was good with lan¬
guages, but was not finding any work. I wondered
what her life would be like if she had grown up, not
trying to fulfill her passion or go along with her natu¬
ral abilities, but if her constitution as a young person,
becoming an older person, was to respond to the
needs of other people. And I also wonder that about
myself)

Listening to the radio, I heard a song by that one
singer, that one soul singer from 50 years ago. It hits
a keen spot in me, because I remember listening to it
when I was a kid. Not that I was alive 50 years ago,
but that it was on the radio when I was a kid. I imag¬
ine that the people who were in their teens and early
20s when it came out have their own kind of keenness
toward it, unless it just didn’t happen to be some¬
thing they listened to, or their associations with it are
to the rumpled and staticky aspects of late adoles¬
cence:

The road goes on forever, if you know how to drive on
it. You have to get in a groove to where you don’t
need to stop for gas and you don’t need to use the gas
station bathroom, and you don’t need to blink. Once
you get into that mode, you can go on the road for¬
ever, in a narrow, high-walled rut of glory}

Back when S. and I were disciples of Jesus, walking
the earth in the Holy Land (such as it was), he used
to tell us all the time, “Ask for your daily bread.” We

133

were both from fairly well-off families, so this was a
new concept for us, until we got disowned. Now that I
am in my 50s, I’m finding that it’s not just my barley
and wine that I pray for, but also for my motivation,
my social interactions, the comfort for all the things I
mourn, and the gift of being able to see people for
who they really are}

I stopped what I was doing and found a quiet place to
pray. As I prayed, I could feel inside me a work, a
quiet voice talking to me, unraveling me, untying the
knots in me. It was a wonderful experience, like being
massaged by a whole day instead of a specific person.

I could feel toxic feelings inside me being eased, and
flushed out of me, in a somewhat painful way. I was
quiet for a whole day, and then I got noisy again,
somehow, without realizing what I was doing or where
the noise came from}

Younger people sometimes ask me what I do for a liv¬
ing, and I tell them, “I don’t know. I really don’t
know.” and they’re puzzled, they ask “Wait, are you ...
unemployed???” And I say, “No, I have a job, but I
don’t know where my life comes from. It might come
from my job. It might come from my social life, or my
worship of God. I want to say that it comes from
God, but I don’t always know that. And today I just
don’t know.” Some of the young people are content
with that, or even look at me with greater trust and
respect, while others (the ones who were like me when
I was their age) bark back with some kind of bluff,

134

blunt, brisk expectation of there always being an an¬
swer for everything:

I was on trial one time. I had been accused of battery.
What happened was, I was drunk one night, and a
woman was very sad, very sober, having just come
into the bar. And she looked so pretty, so sad, that I
went up to her and said “You need something.” and
hugged her, but she was not happy with that, and
said “Get off of me!” and yet I saw how sad she was,
how sober, and I did not respond to what she said,
until I registered the anger and disgust on her face,
and yet I still touched her shoulder until someone
came to pull me off, and she lost her sadness that
night, never to show it to me again, and instead wore
a face of coldness and perhaps even anger, and I saw
her in court, with her lawyer, and my lawyer said to
not look at her, but I did, and that’s how I know that
her face no longer showed any sadness, whether it was
somewhere in her or not}

When I was young, I was fascinated by lasers. It
struck me as very interesting that you could take ordi¬
nary light and turn it into something much different,
much more powerful, simply by focusing it and getting
onto a specific wavelength. And I’ve found that this is
the case too with being a human being, when you are
young you are like the light of a lamp, and as you get
older, you become like a laser, become so destructive
and purposeful:

135

I just got in the mail today my meditation robe. Per¬
haps in the right environment it would look appropri¬
ate, perhaps on a retreat up in the mountains, but
here in the city, it makes me look silly. It’s just what
you’d expect a monk to wear, and I think it’s beauti¬
ful that it will make me look silly, as I have read in a
venerable book that humiliations are a sure path to
getting rid of the self-nature. Then again, the humilia¬
tions you choose are usually nothing more than points
of pride}

It’s the time of day that I bathe, out here on the river
on the back of my property, because I figure that I
won’t be doing any more work for the day, although
you never know. I do some more work, but it tends to
be inside the house, going over miscellaneous things
and cooking dinner for the family. It’s the heat of the
day, the 20th of July, 20—.

There was a sign set in our paths when we were
young, my brother, my (future) sister-in-law, and I,
and the sign pointed two different ways, toward
“UGLY AND HAPPY” and “SAD AND BEAUTI¬
FUL”. We each took our paths and met up years later,
in the midst of having been in the same cities and the
same social circles, bitterly mourning the primordial
destruction of “HAPPY AND BEAUTIFUL”, then less

136

bitterly and with hope}

I remember when I was a chess piece, a pawn in a
chess game, and I leapt out, eager to do battle for the
royal couple, and then next turn, it turns out that I’d
leapt too soon because someone captured me, defying
all logic — en passant. I don’t understand and never
will how I could have been put into chains so off¬
handedly}

When I was younger, I once had a talk with the peo¬
ple who know what the rules of reality are, and they
told me that there was something I needed to under¬
stand about women, that they were all innocent crea¬
tures waiting to be led, never stronger than a man,
sheep to be pastored. I cried when I heard that, and
walked many hills looking for the woman to shepherd
me, but I was alone, and I was drifting down a river,
when I decided to look for an equal in the night time,
a fellow shepherd, in the wastes of noise and darkness
where I was taught how to use my eyes and set my
jaws. And I hoist my lamp aloft, looking for this
scarred and strong and beautiful woman, and my
lamp runs out of fuel, so I wake up and drift through
the day, picking my way among the rocks, seeking to
erase seeking to see, not knowing what I am or who I
am}

But I feel like I have spoken too freely. Somehow deep
and strange loneliness — and of course I am confess¬
ing to this as I write — is the most shameful, most

137

disconnecting thing of all. I don’t know how many
budding friendships I have destroyed by saying what
was universally true. My lamp also wants to find the
human being who affirms desperation}

S. says to me “But then you met me, and that all
changed, right?” “I don’t know,” I reply. She starts to
cry, without looking away from me, and then turns
away and walks toward the door, but I stop her, be¬
cause I need to keep someone like her in my life}

You don’t know a person just by seeing them from be¬
hind — you may not even identify them, give them
the right first name. But you then have to get up the
courage to tap that person on the shoulder and say
“Here I am”, which sounds so strange nowadays}

Before I leave on the great and restful cruise to the
south-western islands, the one which will restore my
soul, I need to finish one last project, this book born
of turmoil and longing. As I will be on the cruise of
accommodation, I will be unable to reach any of you
here in our rectangular universe, and I will be so
caught up in the peace that comes beside the ship’s
swimming pool, that very little of what I would say to
you would do you any good}

There is anger in love, and though I will always prefer
a driven sorrow without anger, I will add to that sor¬
row my own anger, not the anger of Malcolm X, or
the Epistle of James, or even of Jesus in the temple,

f38

but my own anger'.-

“But anger is so — negative,” says S. to me, with her
brow furrowed. “Please understand,” I say, “that I
want a particular anger, suited for me, but I have no
love of anger, and I do not wish any of my own petty
bitterness, I want to accept only the anger that is
God’s, in the service of God, love’s anger for love’s
service. And I will be questioned, and the only answer
to such questioning (but not when I am questioned by
you and yours) is silence.”

It is the morning after the heavy burden of the night
of the 21st of July, 20—.

“I have a question for you,” S. asked, with both her
voice and her eyes, “Is suffering a good thing or a bad
thing?” //I looked out the window and said “It de¬
pends. Some suffering is necessary and beneficial for
healing. Some is unnecessary and of extra benefit in
building you up into an overflowing person. Some is
unnecessary and tears you down to the unredeemed
hell. Some strips you down to nakedness before God,
the only place from which you can be clothed. So,
some is worth something, and some is not.” // “How
can you tell which kind of suffering you’re experienc¬
ing?” // “Sometimes you know and sometimes you

139

don’t.” // “And how can you tell about other people’s
suffering? It’s hard to tell what other people feel a lot
of the time.” // “I am inclined to say that there may
be this rule to apply: In the grey areas, assume that
your suffering is for your good, but others’ suffering is
not for theirs.” // “But there’s a paradox there. What
happens when I see you suffering? You’re always push¬
ing me away.” // “I’m sorry, I don’t know. Maybe I
need a better rule, or a better way to understand and
discern between the different species of suffering.” //
She says to me, “What a funny person I’ve gotten in¬
volved with.” with sorrow’.-

There were some people questioning me, asking me
why everything I wrote was all about me. They were
questioning me, mind you. And I said to them, “If this
book can be all about me, then you can write your
books all about you. Everyone needs to become some¬
thing, this world has enough people who are striving
to not become.” But this did not convince them, and
they searched for ways to trap me)

S. reads this and says “I think you come off as a little
paranoid.” And I say to her, “Yes, but what can I do?
There are some who are given enemies from birth, and
some who are given enemies by their friends, and
some who have enemies for the sake of the kingdom of
God. I have received this enmity. I know that those
who perceive enmity in some unjustified way are con¬
sidered paranoid by ... whom? Their friends? Or does
this therapy come from their enemies? You are my

140

friend. Do you think I’m paranoid?” “I don’t know.”
she says. “You’re a complicated person.”

I will trust this bridge with my weight, knowing that
though it is old, a group of people has just walked
across it without incident. Nothing fell off the bridge
as they walked. I begin across the bridge, one step at
a time, looking up at the dark grey sky, knowing that
I will be rained on, as I walk over to the saddle in
front of me, across this ravine. I start to sing a song
to myself, and it even begins to drizzle, and then I am
across the bridge, onto the damp earth. I don’t know
who will come behind me, or what they will think of
the bridge, or of the cloudy skies that are perpetual in
this part of the world'.-

Back when I was a computer programmer, I once
punched up a whole long program, the purpose of
which was to calculate the angle of deflection of bul¬
lets off of a spherical surface. For the life of me, al¬
though I can remember the mathematics behind what
I was doing as though they were a recurring night¬
mare, I have no recollection why I cared about spheri¬
cal surfaces or bullets. Yet the mathematics have
served me well in later life'.-

My favorite time of the week was when we had arts
and crafts time in the library. I went to a small school,
so we tended to use rooms for multiple purposes. Oh
those wonders I created! A Frankenstein’s monster
made out of cardboard tubes! A bear made out of

141

some kind of thick brown thread, which I distressed
until it was sufficiently fuzzy, and then glued to con¬
struction paper! A house made out of tongue depres¬
sors (or were they popsicle sticks?)! A castle drawn
onto a piece of paper with colored pencils! To this
very day I have these artistic creations attached to the
walls of my apartment, to remind me of my glory days
as an artist, and what kind of person I was when I
was small:

The bell tolls the late morning hour, and all of us
peasants know that lunch is coming, lunch is coming,
lunch is coming, just hang in there. It is the 21st of
July, 20—.

I decided to write a manual on how to live life. I’m
going to put all the math in it, unlike my competitors.
That way, it will actually work'.-

I bought a shovel and went onto the back part of my
property, over by the statue of the fish, and started
digging a trench. I didn’t know why I was digging the
truth, I mean, the trench, I mean, I was digging to
find the treasure hidden in my back property, what¬
ever treasure there is out there. Maybe somebody hid
some treasure out there. I don’t know why I’m out on
my back property, digging this hole in the ground)

142

I had a teacher in secondary school who bought me a
flower once. Now, lest you suspect anything inappro¬
priate, this was in the context of a specific kind of re¬
lationship, one in which there was a lot of tension and
misunderstanding. That teacher, Mrs. X, was very
perceptive, and saw that I was a beautiful violet,
stuck in a boy’s body. This humiliated me at the time,
and has since turned me into a stubborn person, capa¬
ble of holding to any point of view, so long as it is my
own'.-

I'm not sure what the value of gardening is anymore,
now that tomatoes have become so cheap, tomatoes
ripened in the special hydroponic greenhouse offshore
complexes, floating in the oceans and major rivers of
our beloved rectangle. Tomatoes were the last hold¬
out, the last thing you could grow better on your own.
Now all we get out of our gardens are random sur¬
pluses, in this age of choice and surpluses, and of
course the satisfaction of doing things ourselves, and
being outside in the sunshine and fresh air on a week¬
end morning:

Back when I was working 3 jobs as a single father sup¬
porting 2 kids, I often wondered what it would be like
to wonder things. I saw my kids wondering things, in
the slivers of time I got to spend with them. They
would look at the floor and wonder how many ants
could fit in the carpet. They would look at the ceiling
and wonder where the next crack would form. They

143

would look at the TV and wonder how they got the
faces to come from so far away, and how the remote
control worked. They were full of wonder at that age,
and I was just answering all their questions out of po¬
liteness, although sometimes out of irritation}

I was throwing mudpies at girls once and then they
threw mudpies back. For some reason, all the big peo¬
ple were against this, even though we were having a
blast all afternoon, that cloudy summer day}

In the town, we had respectable citizens as well as un¬
respectable ones. I learned as a young ruffian that I
derived greater pleasure from inconveniencing the re¬
spectable citizens than the unrespectable ones. I was
learning, as a scion of the respectable, to identify with
the unrespectable. I was learning the morality of the
outsider, to rise up and justify rising up and rebellion
by noting the hypocrisy of the respectable. And then I
got old and tired of all that}

We killed pigs all the time on the farm, growing up,
and I never thought anything of it, until somehow the
sheer repetition of it started to work on me. I’m not
sure how to describe it, other than that the note,
which you would draw with a dead pig getting carved
up for the meat, rather than with a circular note-head
with a long straight stem coming out of it, was play¬
ing over and over, and deriving a new meaning
through its repetition}

144

One time, when I lived in the Mandelbrot set, I met a
young frog named Possel, who hopped way down the
set, at that low scale where you see all those branches
of the Mandelbaum. He was trying to find infinity,
from which he could derive the resources to court and
eventually mate, carrying on his family legacy. I was
out hunting for infinity too, for my own purposes, and
we shared tips on how to decrease our sizes, in order
to find the infinite in the midst of the finite’.-

A big log of my afternoon task, suspended by a chain,
vertically, is swinging back and forth over the minia¬
ture golf hole of unburdening of all that I feel inside,
this rainy afternoon at the family fun center of the
21st of July, 20—.

I was full of complaints, full of bad things to say
about all the petty things that were wrong with my
life, but what I really hated was that I couldn’t have
all that suffering break me down into a final moment
of giving up, in which I would choose to live a better
life:

Where I was living, the city was surrounded by pure
majesty, 15,000 foot peaks. My brother waxed poetic
about his mountains, the lovely mountains of his
home, and I said, they were nothing compared to my

145

peaks, and he was crushed, as he had not intended to
be competitive with his praise, but then thought
“Well, my wife is better than yours” and yet had the
good sense to not mention such a thing'.-

Laying on my four-post bed, in my air-conditioned
room, I pray to God, having been stretched out by
life. God has left me no escape — this is the guidance
for me, a reassurance. There are things that I know
that God alone can provide, and it was my privilege
to come to know that I craved them:

There is a desert experience of walking without God
nearby, and there is a desert experience of seeking
God in the desert, a mountain experience of training
the stubborn apparatus toward God, these faculties
that are not so wedded to sense perception, essen¬
tially, as they are to the obvious pursuits of the hu¬
man, this pragmatism that has as its aims the growls
of a life lived only in this world. We tend to live our
lives in a world, in the Chutes and Ladders of earth or
the Candyland of heaven, but maybe God is trying to
teach me not to live in any world, to be a stranger to
all environments’.-

I bought an ice cream cone as I was at the big old
park all by myself. I savored the coconut flavor of the
coconut scoop, and the pineapple flavor of the pineap¬
ple scoop. I looked around the promenade at the
young couples in love and thought about how lucky,
and unlucky, they were, and about how unlucky, and

146

lucky, I aim

I drove a small car down to the lake, and got out, and
tried to count all the fishermen. There were 14 fisher¬
men when I counted, yet of course, I could only count
as I walked, and perhaps some came and went as I cir¬
cled this 6-mile-circumferenced lake. There is no real
way for me to know, but I counted, not in order to
know the exact number, but in order to notice the
people fishing here, to feel a wealth of fellow human
beings, before I sat down to cast my own line into the
greenish blue:

Later one evening, I got out my grill and cleaned it. 1
think I am going to have a party, a real summer cook-
out, and invite some of my best friends over. S., and
my brother and sister-in-law, and Mr. D. from two
doors down, and the L.s from church. Hopefully some
other people too, but I don’t want to get my hopes
too high. We’re going to have barbecued vegetables,
meat and maybe even fruit. We ll see if I’m so inspired
on the day of.-

While I was at work, your voice mail came, so I didn’t
have time to respond to it, but now I have some time.
Don’t worry about what you were talking about. I’ve
moved on. I barely remember what you said that
night, and it’s not that big a deal, now that you re¬
mind me. Maybe in the future don’t say things like
that? That’s as much as I’m going to say as far as
that goes. Anyway, hope to see you later. I’m planning

147

a cook-out one of these weeks, you can come if you’re
available’.-

While I was homeless and jobless, your letter came to
my old address, but I hadn’t set up any way to for¬
ward it, so I wouldn’t have even gotten it now, three
months after you sent it, except that I happened to
sort of know the guy who moved in where I lived, and
I went over just sort of wondering if he’d gotten any
mail for me, and so he had. I am sorry to hear of your
loss and I hope that if there’s anything I can do, you’ll
let me help you. I know that we were not on the best
of terms the last time we talked, and I hope that
somehow time has dulled and blunted some of the
sting, but honestly, I feel it still, and I think it might
be best if we didn’t meet again in person. But I really
respected your father and for his sake, I’d be willing
to at least come to the funeral, if that’s okay for you.
Of course, I’d have to get some nice clothes again, but
I'm sure I could figure something out somehow. Oh
what am I saying? You wrote that letter three months
agd--

While I was living in a lousy apartment in a foreign
country, I put my wash out on the line to dry, hoping
(as was often enough the case), that no birds would
defecate on anything important, causing me to have to
wash again, this tide and juggernaut of laundry. I
wished that I could be back in my native country,
that great quadrilateral of freedom, but I was stuck
here in a differently-shaped land, and yet as I was

148

stuck I was being slowly, tappingly, rebuilt in order to
appreciate this completely different wind, this wind
blowing from one end of the country to the other. I in¬
vited some people over to my apartment from the lo¬
cal church, people whom I hoped would be good to
me, although I do not know them and I do not know
their language very well. There’s so much in this for¬
eign land that forces me to trust people, and this is a
beautiful thing for me, I wish I had been exiled a long
time ago, and I am so very homesick for the place
that I used to hate:

A garbage truck passes by, in this land of extreme
punctuality and regularity, and so I know that it is
precisely 6 PM on garbage day, this 21st of July, 20—.

We hear about people exhibiting a marked change in
behavior, and thus it is that we become concerned
about their sanity. Yet perhaps the truth is that, for
all time, or a period of time, they were that way on
the inside but were prevented from showing -it'.-

I am driving a vehicle down a road, a car, a street
near my house, a foreign car, Grover Street. My ears
detect a sound coming from a house nearby, and I
stop to investigate. It is the sound of a fight, a domes¬
tic disturbance. I stand still on the pavement wonder-

149

ing what to do. Is this part of a relationship, the nor¬
mal airing of grievances? Is this dirty laundry getting
cleaned with water and then maybe getting beaten
with a stick, as laundry was once done down by the
river in the old days? Or is this something abusive?
Whatever I decide, my intuition is that if this fight in¬
volves audible abuse, from the street, there was some¬
thing abusive to it, quietly, at all times:

I pulled a rabbit out of a hat, as I did my magic trick.
I keep rabbits at home, a whole hutch-full. I name
them after great servants throughout the Bible:

Joseph, Elisha, Baruch, Joab, even Jesus. They are all
pure white, and I let them roam around my backyard
sometimes, watching them carefully lest the neighbor¬
hood hawks, or the neighborhood temptations, come
to fetch them away to an evil fate. Today, I am in
front of a group of children, and I pulled the rabbit
out of the hat not to trick them, but to provide for
them a rabbit to play with. The truth is too compli¬
cated to explain, but just understand this: I’m only an
illusionist, there is an entirely materially-understand¬
able explanation for what I am doing. I am a Chris¬
tian, and I don’t intend to communicate that there’s
no such thing as the supernatural. But with my exper¬
iments, my illusions, my demonstrations, I give peo¬
ple, children, adults, the image of a feat of wonder be¬
ing performed that is not really magic, but which ap¬
pears to be magic}

There’s a big table in my apartment, I broke my back

150

getting it up the stairs, but by golly, I was going to
have a big table in my apartment, if there was going
to be anything big. I like having a big table because it
gives me a lot of space to put all the things out on it
at once that I need to have out on it at once. For in¬
stance, I have notes for my sermons and I also have
receipts from expenditures that the church will reim¬
burse to whoever it was who needs reimbursements. I
am the superman, the ubermensch, the one man who
does everything at this church:

We run this church on the old model: I am the pastor,
and I am the servant. I am paid very little, and I am
single, and there will not be a wife provided to me
from the ranks of my congregation, and I will seek
none from the outer world. It is not my job to do all
this administrative stuff, but the old ways die hard,
and so far I have not found anyone else both willing
and able to do it. I’d rather not preach, I’d rather not
reimburse people. As far as I’m concerned, that whole
church building could just burn to the ground, and we
could all mourn in its ashes].-

The first time I saw S., she came in the door with
some congregant. The congregant was a relative of
hers. I took no particular notice of her, but rather
stood up at the front of the old ark and preached a
sermon about something important to me, but which I
had said too many times, like my favorite music which
I play too much in my apartment as I write my ser¬
mons. I met her after the service, when she came up

151

to me and told me what I said was very interesting. I
had no idea what I said was actually interesting. So,
as I was the pastor, it fell to me to make something of
this comment, and I invited her to our midweek Bible
study, which of course, I teach:

She arrived and asked all kinds of questions, and I was
thrown off. Some of them were embarrassing questions
about Bible concepts that I couldn’t explain, even, in
our discussion of the Gospels (specifically Mark), in
which I had the educator’s foresight to print out pas¬
sages from the other Gospels, a kind of home-made
harmonization, I so clearly left in the evidence of con¬
tradictions that none of my parishioners noticed, but
which puzzled her. Was the Bible accurate? Was it
not?

We even met for coffee (I LOVE coffee) at a coffee
shop near the church building. Our congregation
thinks nothing of the circumstance of a young pastor
having coffee with a young woman at a coffeeshop —
perhaps we are on a date. We eventually got to talk¬
ing about the specific doctrines of the Bible. She had
some concept of Christianity, but was quite open to
learning and questioning. Eventually we started talk¬
ing about faith and works'.-

Ephesians 2:8-9 says “...for by grace you have been
saved through faith, and not of yourselves; it is the
gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast.”
And yet in James 2:24 it says “You see then that by

152

works, a man is justified, and not only by faith.” We
came upon this controversy when we read in Genesis
(trying to start from the beginning) of this, in chapter
4, verses 6 through 7: “Yahweh said to Cain, ‘Why are
you angry? Why has the expression of your face
fallen? If you do well, won’t it be lifted up? If you
don’t do well, sin crouches at the door. Its desire is for
you, but you are to rule over it-!’”

I was pretty sure I had all the answers to all of S.’s
questions about these three Scriptures. I know this
sounds like a bad thing for me to say, but as a
teacher, sometimes you become confident in what you
know — and yet open to being corrected. I wanted to
see what she would think, so I kept asking her ques¬
tions. I didn’t want her to have answers without a re¬
lationship'.-

I know that I have an issue with beauty. I love beauty.
I will sacrifice a lot for it. I’m talking about personal
beauty. I think this desire for personal beauty is the
main reason I’m a Christian. Personal beauty, as in,
am I a beautiful human being on the inside? So for
me, the verse about Cain being crestfallen and trying
to lift his face up really resonates. I don’t really care
about being sent to hell — whatever, I’ve been there.

I do care about being (present tense) worthy of hell. It
looks like I have to master my own sin in order to
raise up my countenance. And this makes sense to me,
because at the root of it, real sin is all about a deci¬
sion that you make — you can’t be held accountable

153

for whatever harmful things you can’t help doing. The
root of sin is this willful opposition, this existential
mystery of rebelling against love (love is my favorite
name for God). And so the way to not sin is to decide
to not sin, and there’s no way God is going to do that
for you. You have to do it yourself.-

I don’t think “it’s” quite exactly that I don’t want to
be counted worthy of hell, though. Hell is a rejection,
and I don’t even know if “it” feels like a fear of rejec¬
tion. Maybe it’s a fear of rejection that I can’t even
put into words. Maybe it’s just the feeling of “I am
beautiful” or “I am not beautiful”, and I must be beau¬
tiful, it’s that basic and simple. Or it’s a whirling mix¬
ture of all these things. I don’t know.-

Anyway, do you think I told all of this to S.? I might
have, through subtext and dry explanations, general¬
ized, safe explanations. I don’t think she got what I
was saying, not on that level, and there was something
so dry about me that I think she would not have
thought to talk to me again, except that she was curi¬
ous, there was something to what I was saying. And
so we continued our lessons, and eventually she came
to understand enough to become a Christian — but
she had not lived enough life to convert. Unfortu¬
nately, I know too much, have too much knowledge,
and do not have enough “life” to impart to her — I am
not good at that sort of thing. I guess by “life” I mean
something like “encouragement”. Encouragement al¬
lows you to step out into new boats, rock them, sit in

154

them, fish from them, and then catch the miraculous
catch}

She was enough of a learner, though, that she went off
on her own, and read on her own, and one night had
some kind of spiritual experience, or perhaps it was
during the daytime, or it wasn’t one experience, but
many, because I never did find out, she ended up go¬
ing to another church, but she did invite me to her
baptism, and every so often I think of her, and wonder
how she’s doing, and I even pray for her}

I'm lying in bed, listening to the radio, a concert of
classical music, just resting, after a long, long day. It’s
the night of the 21st of July, 20—.

In my sister-in-law’s family, all the women bear boys.
This, I am sure, is a coincidence, or it is an oblique
message from God. These women are loved by their
sons and their husbands, and live on rafts, inside cab¬
ins, with warm fires, on the river}

When we finally got to know each other, it turned out
that S. was committed to atheism. And I was sad, but
I did not turn away from her, because people like her
do not come around very often}

155

I look upon myself as special and beautiful and then I
have to ask myself, “Where is God in all of this?” And
I see myself as weak, and the world so strong, so con¬
tinuing, so destructive, so meaningless, and I have to
ask myself, “Where is God in all of this?” and on a
good day I get caught up in myself, my pet pleasures,
my desire for recognition, my laughter, my callous-
hearted lightness, my of-courseness, and I have to ask
myself “Where is God in all this?” — this question,
which in all three cases restores me’.-

There came a point where S. had to go, and I knew
that her path and mine were diverging, as though I
would never see her again. This was my final commu¬
nication of love to her, to wave to her as she left, as
herself, like a bird returning to the heavens’.-

There was once a time where there was nothing new,
and then a long time where new things were made,
then in frantic profusion, and now all new things have
been made, the accident is over, and all I can do is try
to authentically be who I need to be to the people
that are given to me to love:

It’s so strange to me, but I am realizing that I —
somehow — am a presence in other peoples’ hermetic
universes, that though they have their own lives —
somehow I am in them; and this realization is as
though the only thing that existed before was my uni¬
verse, in which other people are beings perceived. I
sacrifice a goat to this realization in my backyard and

156

look on its death sadly, with a sense of loss and pow¬
erlessness, but also with the assurance of having put
on the right pair of shoes}

As I walk past the little shops and vacant buildings on
24th Street, near Eagle Avenue, the sky supports
patchy clouds, the weather is warm or even hot, the
air humid, and from the northern sea there comes a
gentle breeze, a fresh breath, and I must ask “What is
the meaning of this breeze?” not because I don’t like
it, but because it is exactly what I need}

I am becoming hungry today. For several weeks I
wasn’t hungry and I only ate because I decided to eat,
because eating made sense to me. I didn’t eat because
I wanted to, or because it was a need for me, I ate be¬
cause it’s a duty of society to eat. But today I am be¬
coming hungry, and I seek out the simple food that
makes me happy, such food as macaroni and cheese,
bread with cheese on it, and hot peppers baked with
cheese inside of them}

S. and I meet up again somewhere, sometime, nothing
but us for miles around, no past, no future, simply a
day of reality, not looking at each other, looking in¬
stead out at the clouds of the sky, in which we are ei¬
ther standing, or at which we look, from far below on
the ground, saying nothing, knowing nothing, speak¬
ing endlessly, noticing the animals around us, ap¬
proaching them and respectfully waiting for them to
disclose their natures and names to us. S. eventually

157

breaks the spell and we are back in irreality, talking to
each other in the coffeeshop where we have agreed to
meet, I don’t know how she broke the spell — perhaps
it was simply that she needed to cope with the things
that, though unreal, captivate our imagination}

The sea is full of strange beings, anglerfish and puffer-
fish and clownfish. There is deep off the waters of the
coast of our island nation, down in a trench formed by
the slipping of tectonic plates, even rumored to be a
fish that knows everything, but which, having known
everything, has no desire to learn, and so spends all
its time deep in the darkness, cursing the fact that it
can still perceive the coldness of the deep, and the gi¬
ant squid that inadvertently touch it with their sloppy
tentacles}

It is the middle of the afternoon and I’m afraid I’ve
been taking too long a lunch break, and that I should
be glad that I am a salaried worker so that I can in¬
dulge in such extravagances. It is the 22nd of July,
20 —.

Today is a day of celebration. I am throwing a party
for myself because I found my way back to the Fa¬
ther’s house. I am going to kill an animal to feed ev¬
eryone, to celebrate myself, but this animal was the

158

Father’s, because every good thing is his. And I am
celebrating him when I celebrate myself, because I am
his. I have put out a chair for all of my guests to sit
in, and I have put on new clothes in which to greet
you all. When you come, do not feel awkward, but if
you do, come talk to me to see that I am real. I may
have died, but I am not a ghost. If you doubt my
word, thinking that I am a ghost, and that ghosts say
that they are alive when they are not — and maybe
I’ve given off the appearance of life before, when I
thought I was alive but I wasn’t — then see where it
is that I have come from and where it is that I am go¬
ing, and if you are on the way of life, you will recog¬
nize the life in me}

The power to change is like the power to flush a toilet.
You press a lever and all of the waste goes away. It is
amazing what you can do if there is a water system
behind you, and an apparatus to convert that water
system into a waste-removal experience. Now that we
are in such severe drought, we celebrate cleanliness
less often — what can we do? But though the world is
crashing down around us, and we have had to learn to
live through the way of hunger and thirst, we still
have the power to change — rather, to love}

I'm trying out a new record on my record player. I
bought this record at the record store yesterday, and I
was so busy preparing for your visit that I did not
have the chance to play it. It’s the new album from
our favorite band, the band that nobody else likes,

159

but which we like. You’re looking at me like, “Okay, I
can see what’s going on, why are you talking so much,
I want to hear this record!” But you’re keeping your
mouth closed and your heart is mild. And so, here it
goes..}

Back when I was a dinosaur (more specifically, when I
was a brontosaurus), I used to love to peer over the
treetops, to see the low clouds coming in off the north¬
ern sea, to cover the prehistoric forest with life-giving
dew. It was my favorite thing to do, and because
those were the good old slow days, some days, it was
just about all I would do, other than constantly graze
to maintain my caloric intake}

My heart full, my eyes wet, I found myself paralyzed
with happiness, to see such a crowd of people gath¬
ered to witness my release from prison. To stand un¬
der the pale sunshine, the weak sunshine, which was
yet the free sunshine, the sunshine unveiled, to smell
the smog of downtown traffic, yet to smell it, in itself,
and not mediated by the prison’s air conditioning sys¬
tem, to see all of those people gathered just for me,
the people who kept faith with me, believing in my in¬
nocence (even though I am not innocent — yet I am
innocent of the charge that put me in prison), who
look on my face and don’t guess what kind of criminal
I am and always was, but am no longer, all of this
makes me tip forward when I finally do walk, as
though the earth and I are going to tumble around
each other, and yet I catch myself and walk as nor-

160

mally, and I get into a free-person’s car, and we head
off to the park, where apparently there is a major
sound system and grill set up for me and my
people)

A raven flies overhead and I watch it, watch it soar a
little, settle into a tree. I am up high, in an 8,000 foot
mountain, somewhere in the obliqueness of the trape¬
zoidal country, on my honeymoon. I follow over to the
raven’s tree, and see beneath it a lock of hair, which is
that of my beloved, and a sense of dread strikes me.
And I go looking for her all over the mountain, won¬
dering where she has gone and who she has become.
And she taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey, were
you looking for me? I’ve been wondering what you’ve
been looking for this whole time and why you were
dragging me around this mountain the whole time.”
And I laugh at this, at my afternoon of foolishness)

And the sea comes crashing down onto the sands of
the southern part of our island nation, and I can hear
the crumpet merchants yelling out “Crumpets and
crabs! Crab-crumpets!” and the smell of rotting kelp
comes to intoxicate me, and beside me are my dog,
and my best friend L., and S., and my sister-in-law
and brother, and their children, and we’re all sitting
still, well-behaved, staring out at a sun that will never
quite set and yet is always setting)

It is the golden afternoon of the 22nd of July, 20—.

161

If you are a pioneer, you may think that it is your
skills with the gun and the map that matter most, or
your ability to show your two boys and three girls how
to shoot and trudge, or you may even believe that
your home on the southern shore, which exists as a
figment in your heart, and in the future as your home¬
stead, this reality birthed within you is the greatest
thing, but the greatest thing is a reality in you which
is a call from outside you, which will get you to go be¬
yond pioneering as you know it, may send you beyond
the shores of the south, or may root you down into
peace, which cannot be put into words — you will
never know its nature — but which will always elicit
words of longing; which is what the word “pioneering”
refers to in the dead abstract general, but is alive and
ineffable, specific and never seen}

I was called before the high council,
delivered up by the City Bailiff,
paraded publicly down Sparrow Street,

(which was intended to shame
or put a fear into me,)
and the 30 foot high foreheads looked at me
sternly,

with 1,000 years of past behind the motions of
their lips and tongues,
and all this antiquity told me, as one,

162

“You are accountable to us because we love you.’’’

You need to stop what you are doing and take a new
step in life. You need to put down your knitting and
stop working on that old car. There is no time for all
your preparations, there is no future for all that busy-
work. I don’t know what it is that you need to do, but
I can see a multitude of people who are doing things
that they should stop doing}

You’re so awesome, one time you had some cereal for
breakfast and you used it all day long to fuel what
you did. You knew hunger for a day, and you did your
race proud (the human race), you were humane and
humanitarian on that day of hunger}

One time, you were swinging on the swingset and got
the brilliant idea to jump off. It was as though you
were the first person to ever think of the idea. Had
you been 20 years older at the time, you would have
never tried it, you originality-seeker, from having fully
registered how pointless and unoriginal an action that
is. As a 28 year old, all you do is consume media and
work your job so that you can consume media with
your friends}

I was once registered for the draft, but I got on the
Undersea Railroad and made my way down to the Un¬
dercolony, where I spent the duration of the war doing
neutral things like repairing sonar machines and min¬
ing apatite off the sea floor}

163

You had a brilliant maths teacher in high school who
inspired you to be a philosopher, and you’ve been
working hard on your doctoral thesis, your magnum
opus, your dead bearskin rug, your leatherbound ball
and chain, and you had totally intended to show it to
that brilliant math teacher, but now he has gone to
another country and you don’t know his address}

The inventors of the airplane grew up in the same
town as me but I never said “Howdy do?” to them. It
wasn’t as though I hated them, bullied them, or pur¬
posely ignored them, it’s just that I had other things
to do with other friends. Nevertheless, it is equally im¬
possible for me to get free rides in their airplanes as it
is for those who taunted the boys, stole their lunches,
and put leeches on the backs of their necks}

You and I have something in common: we’re both try¬
ing to flush ourselves down the toilet, to go on an ad¬
venture of misery in the land of excrement, to find the
dark smells, and the pale light coming down from the
rare open manhole, finding out what life lives down
there, leaving nothing in that bathroom for anybody
to find, except perhaps the clothes we purchased but
didn’t really need, considering that a week later we
decided to flush ourselves down the toilet}

I played a harp in the band that played at your wed¬
ding, and you looked up from your blushing groom in
the midst of the reception and said “Play ‘Lily of the

164

Northern Valley’” and I played, and you snuggled up
against your stoical groom, and then you said “Play
‘Pm So In Love With You, It Hurts’” and we didn’t
know how to play that song but thought we did and
started playing it anyway and you smiled, because you
knew that we didn’t know what we were doing and
that seemed perfect for the moment’.-

One time, when I was a troll and you were crossing a
bridge that I considered to be my home, I went out in
front of you and said “Ho Hey Hi Hoy, what are you
doing, you stupid boy?” and you ran away and I was
disappointed because you didn’t leave anything for me
to steal, not even your set of marbles;

It is exactly... not quite anymore... midnight, the com¬
mencement of the 23rd of July, 20—.

You can hear a guitar crashing down through the
root, playing its chords, you can sense in the air a
dullness held in contradiction with electricity wrapped
in a stupefaction, your mind and heart long for some¬
thing transformed in this world, you are growing on
the wild path, you are a witness to a power and au¬
thority that are returning, and so you are a horror’.-

It bothers you when you are underestimated, but this

165

is actually a derivative irritation and discouragement.
The true discouragement and irritation comes because
the people who are underestimating you are also un¬
derestimating themselves. And the underestimations
come together, a family at a picnic'.-

Am I speaking untruths regarding you? Do not believe
what I say if it does not make you love more and bet¬
ter. That is the criterion for truth, those sentences
that you believe which cause you to love more and
better. For too long, our goal, as human beings, has
not been the worship and emulation, the imbibing of
love:

My eyelids are drooping from all the strange dreams I
dreamed last night. I was sick last night, I had some
kind of fever, some kind of chills and aches. This is my
reality, week after week of illness. And so I must ask
some other people to do my work for me, a house¬
keeper comes and cleans, my brother comes to do yard
work. This house must continue, although I cannot
care for it. If someone could speak and think for me,
then I could die in peace:

He who has his life will lose it, and he who loses his
life for the sake of the King of Heaven, that terrible
power, will find it. They taught me of the King of
Heaven when I was young, and then as I aged I saw
the terror of the kingdom of heaven as it came in my
life, the swift fall of the axe, the scattering of the
birds, the fires on the hills, and my life taken up into

166

hlS:

She who has her life had better lose it too, in the
midst of whatever it is that makes a woman a woman
and not a man. I don’t pretend to understand any¬
thing like this, my brain used to like these sorts of rid¬
dles, but now I just know that a woman is different to
me than a man, and that therefore the women that
are “to-me” (if that makes sense) must lose their lives
although in some way they are different than the men,
I don’t know what I’m saying, but you women, lose
your lives in order to gain, for the kingdom of heaven
is coming, and will bring its violence before it brings
its peace:

The philosopher speaks with his realistic point of
view, with his smooth logic, with his tone of reason.

He knows so very much, he is so clear, so rational.

And so the world goes on in which the poor are locked
up, the rich are ugly, and the grass is dying, and all
people are simply filling in time, waiting around to
die.-

But your old life clings to you, all the associations, the
old ways, the old means; you can’t just die to your old
self, no, it is not easy, you can’t die easily, you are not
ready to bring yourself to the amputation table and
have that surgery done, that rapid, rapid surgery. No,
your time has not yet come, and yet you are becoming
restless, under all these unnecessary, longstanding
limbs’.-

167

When the kingdom of heaven comes with force, will
you join me, S.? I cannot promise safety, I can only
promise that I will not turn you toward the lies that
are so prevalent. It will all seem so compelling then,
both the truth and the lies. I know that I am not any¬
thing to you, I am only speaking as I feel, not as the
reality is between us. In fact, I can say nothing to you,
yet, I continue to speak. Please, if I am to be nothing
to you, look to the life of Jesus, look to that man, and
see what kind of a person he was and is.

To know the truth, you will have to live a life of love,
worshiping love, worshiping the God who is love, you
will have to love the Father, the God who is your true
father. The truth comes not to those who think, but
those who think, feel, and act. I am telling you all of
this because there wasn’t enough time to tell you all
this before, and I don’t know what kind of time there
will be to tell you later)

The apple tree is doing what it should, putting forth
fruit. The crickets are doing what they should, chirp¬
ing, mating, hiding, hopping. The falcons are doing
what they should, soaring, killing, resting. The cats
are doing what they should, sleeping, hunting, explor¬
ing. The wild donkeys are doing what they should,
drinking, grazing, traveling together. The roses are do¬
ing what they should, growing, drinking, putting on
buds. The wind is doing what it should, frightening,
refreshing, kicking up dust. The sun is doing what it

168

should, exploding, dying, giving its light of life}

Now I am lost in the day, this day that is my portion,
the day which I will finish eventually, but which is
outstripping my appetite, it is the morning of the 23rd
of July, 20—.

As part of your life, you will want to communicate,
and so you will attempt all the main forms of commu¬
nication, and you will find that the truth is impossible
to communicate, in this era of a certain kind of lie.

You can write a book, but nobody reads; write a play
which no one will watch; write a movie which no one
will produce; draw a painting which no one will under¬
stand; dance, and find no one else dancing with you;
give a speech that no one will attend; run for office,
and wind up only saying your party’s platform; even
perform a terrorist attack, and only speak for the
kingdom of man and his paranoia. And yet even if you
write a book that people read, and if your movie is
produced, and if your speech goes viral, for many,
many people, it will be taken as a metaphor, as hyper¬
bole. There are truths that cannot be known, not be¬
cause of you, but because of your listeners, and the
veils that cover their hearts, hearts that refuse to see
what is self-evident, for fear of believing-it}

169

But you, you have been enticed, entranced, you have
seen the beauty of the Master, and have walked in his
train. He has given you to drink of his Holy Spirit and
you are in love — but this is even a lie, not that it has
not happened, but that it is not the whole story, and
a truth that obscures the whole truth is part of a lie,
it is a deceptive truth. In all your pleasure of God you
forgot your fear of God, and yet you have learned
your fear of God, by accident, in a generation that
forgot it. You learned your fear of God in the guise of
something other than God, but that horror and terror
you felt, that close redemption you felt, came from the
authority of the universe himself. Your generation
spent so much of its time trying to be smooth and
normal and well-mannered, then lamented its smooth¬
ness, normality, and well-manneredness, in a way that
only perpetuated that hairlessness, and yet amidst all
the murmurs, of soothing and complaint, you were
broken into by God, by the real God, who took you
along for a walk in the meadow and also to visit his
own garden of torment, his Gethsemane, and salted
you with the fire of Gehenna. And so now you are
learning reverence and true responsibility, the true
ability to respond to what is most real:

Repentance is the strange union, of taking responsibil¬
ity and falling into God, of misery and peace, of reli¬
gious artificiality and of drawing closer to God. How is
it that pain could get us close to God? This is a won¬
der in our generation. How is it that self-confrontation
could be the key to health? This is a double wonder in

170

our generation. Repentance is impossible, and yet we
do it, because we have to)

No one repents because they want to, for if they really
wanted to repent, they would have already repented.
This is the mystery of repentance, that anyone can do
it. Something crashes down into your life and you re¬
pent — that happens. You are forced by something
outside yourself to change. Yet also, you desire to de¬
sire to desire, but you do not really desire, and you lie
and pretend, you foul hypocrite, but this is a holy
hypocrisy, you penitent, longing to long, a cartoon,
phantom, wasteling, longing to be real, and God hon¬
ors this particular kind of hypocrisy by opening your
heart. The best and most glorious repentance is the
kind that proceeds from no cause at all, that blas¬
phemes against causality, of which we cannot speak,
but of which we can rejoice)

And yet it is in the nature of repentance that no mat¬
ter what does or does not cause it, it is you that re¬
pents. No one else can repent for you. Your God can¬
not, your mom cannot, your dog cannot, neither can
your pastor, your professor, your lover. There are
some things only you can do, and this is what you
should always be doing, whenever the opportunity
arises)

You set out on the street, walking around, trying to
find, on 33rd Street, exactly where that man went,
that man who was preaching repentance, in the mid-

171

die of the city, that man who asked for change and
then would tell you about repentance, that man who
struck you as doing a good work at the time, and who
you now think could give you some advice!

It is alleged that the last thing people will ignore is vi¬
olence, and yet you know from your personal experi¬
ence that if a man came up to you with a gun and
said “Pay attention to me or die”, you might well
choose to die. There is a love of life that is required in
order to pay close attention to a violent threat. Yet
better than not paying attention, and paying atten¬
tion, in order to live, is to pay attention, out of love of
the truth, and out of love of the person who is the
truth. Perhaps the days of terror are coming to an end
— yet — perhaps, like a terminal patient who makes
one last rally, or the hurricane that comes in October
and rains warm rain one last time, it gathers itself for
its greatest work yet, after which time the kingdom
will have fully arrived'.-

The truth is that when it is a he to fear, it is true to
feel peace, and when it is a lie to feel peace, it is the
truth to fear. The truth is never under your control.
The truth makes you lost, except when it makes you
found. You long ago asked if you would be permitted
to take ownership of yourself for once and devote
yourself to God so that he would do whatever he
wanted with you!

It is later in the morning, with the trees dropping

172

their limbs in this herce wind, on the 23rd of July,
20 —.

There will be some who say to you, “You say you have
the truth and the Spirit, but it is we who have the
truth, for the Spirit works in us and guides us in our
work.” And you are to say to them “God guided Israel
to David, and to Saul, so that he could give them the
gift of kings, a gift that he did not want to give. Judge
by love.”

You will eventually become blind to the reflections in
mirrors, and then you will see the strangeness of ev¬
eryday life, in which we respond to things that are not
there, and then soon after you will see yourself primp¬
ing, and wonder at the meaning of your life':

As you reason and reflect, you will come to under¬
stand and intuitively “get” why any particular person
would do what they do, and so you will come to un¬
derstand and intuitively accept the way the world is,
and then you will wish to God that somehow you
didn’t understand:

All kinds of problems will appear compelling to you
and me, will appeal to our capacity for focus and fire,
but our hearts have to make a discipline of return to

173

God, to see, (even beyond the injustice,) the compas-
sionlessness of our hearts, the multitudes of people
who do not love the multitudes of people, all because
we have not loved these multitudes, we do not have
the heart of God, you and] I].-

What is the meaning of the being of the multitude? It
reveals itself as a force, an avalanche, yet it also re¬
veals itself as the potentiality for a relationship. The
multitude contains every possible person, and some¬
where in the multitude, sweating on a feast day, there
I am, and somewhere else there is S., and also you
(unless I am speaking to S. right now) and you your¬
self, in the potentiality, have already found the one or
two people or even the tribe that were meant to ac¬
company you wherever you need to go, the people
that were meant to sweep you along into their becom¬
ing. How can you not wish for the salvation of every¬
one, o stranger? If the multitudes are not shown com¬
passion, you will always be empty, always alone, for if
the multitudes are damned, so condemned and erased
is your true love].-

We are all strangers, because this is not our home. We
are not at home in ourselves, nor are we at home in
the groups in which we find ourselves, because we are
not constituted according to love. We know that we
are going to be something else, that we are pilgrims,
and so our one constant status is that we are not at
home, never at home. We are finite, in a world that
spoils paintings, we wish to be free of the spoiling, so

174

we are strangers — not at home wishing to have a
wing added on, but out searching because we are the
despoilers, though we never intended it, we must
grasp onto the reality that we have intended to be
fouled paintings, we do shoddy restoration work, it is
through this that we never rest, though our ultimate
goal is peace, even total peace}

This constitutedness, what is it? The ship is built
with sails and a compass and so it sets out to dis¬
cover; without a compass, it would stick to the har¬
bor. We are aimed as a society at muchness, progress,
culture, and technology and not at love — imagine if
we were. To desire to be what we are not can be the
most authentic thing we can do. Take comfort in
times of hardship, when things go against you, be¬
cause then you are opened up, forced open, or opening
with considered joy, to all that goes against your con¬
stitution, the fierce wind that can be your salvation or
your curse. I am constituted in all sorts of ways and
my heart says all sorts of things, but I want to be con¬
stituted anew, refounded under the principles of
courage, clarity, sadness, compassion, drivenness, and
the continual presence and guidance of God}

And you were the one who worked the night shift for
six months, even though it messed you up, but you
continued on, and though you saw dawn from the
wrong side, you survived. And you were the one who
worked on the construction site with your father, and
everyone else thought that he was playing favorites

175

with you, so your father had no choice to be harsh,
and you were 12, but you didn’t cry, even though you
did nothing right all day, and though that habit of not
crying has been its own burden, you survived that day
and you survived your adolescence and what you’ve
bitten off so far of your manhood. And you were the
one who surprised everyone when you ran the 1st and
4th legs of the relay, although you lost, on that day
when everyone was put to the test, and the whole
team was on the verge of quitting. And you were the
one who sat through an abusive relationship, and
though you should have left sooner, so you think, you
survived, and now there is something in your eyes
that lets you see people who suffer. And you were the
one who sat up all night with a fussy baby, only to
learn, after nights and nights, that there was some¬
thing really wrong, only to learn that your baby was
not going to see more than a few more years, only to
learn that you would absolutely have to provide for
your child, and pour everything into her, just as you
would into any other child, only to see her die, and
yet you continued, and gained a glimmer of defiance.
And you were the one who was fed all kinds of lies,
but somehow you got out of that environment, and
now you bless God for the truth that you drink. And
you are the one who has no idea where you are going
or who you are or will be, who stumbles in the dark
and winces at the light, who eats food that gives you
an upset stomach, and then forgets to eat, and then
eats again. You are climbing on a brutal pathway that
leaves cuts and notches in that inner rock of yours,

176

and perhaps you lose the use of some limbs, but you
have an inner hardness that grows and becomes beau¬
tiful and which continues on, a drumbeat that be¬
comes more and more powerful and meaningful the
longer it repeats}

It is the quiet evening of the 23rd of July, 20—.

The night is young and I am old, so I am handing off
this bullhorn to you, to sing the praises of responsibil¬
ity to this crowd of working people, these people who
will be individually called into positions of leadership
over time. I am going to go rest my feet over by the
trash can fire, my feet propped up on this old suit¬
case, which contains all my possessions: some clothes,
a toothbrush, a supply of painkillers, but not too
many, scraps of paper with Bible verses on them, all
contained within a small sheath, a memo pad or two,
some pens, and several things that I will leave as a
mystery}

The needle hits the groove, and the turntable moves
the record around, and a sound comes out and every¬
one dances to it, and then they stop dancing to it and
they start criticizing it, and then they stop criticizing
it and leave the room, and it keeps on playing, until
finally someone comes in from the other wing of the

177

house, and notices this strange everlasting record
player, and wonders if there’s something to be done
with it, to throw it away, or to listen? And they listen
for a bit, but don’t understand what it is that they’re
listening to, and they go off outside and sit under a
tree and think'.-

There are dogs gathering around this body, on this
day of famine, this hour of famine, this time of
famine, and they are beginning to lick the corpse, but
I shoo them off as best as I can because the corpse is
of you, and you deserve more honor than to be eaten
by dogs, although you will have no use for your body,
and the dogs can live by your demise. I want to keep
you around, keep this the best reminder of your exis¬
tence around a little bit longer, because I know that I
will completely forget you in just one week, as time
peels apart and events crowd around me, pinning me
to the wall:

You are the best friend I have ever had, you who have
listened to me thus far. I have been standing on this
street corner, blind and deaf, in this city, in the cen¬
tral plains of our rectangular nation, and I do not
know if anyone but me exists — yes, I know of those
who touch me — but all you passersby may be noth¬
ing or everything to me. But though I will never know
you and never see your faces — oh, I do remember
what it was like to see and hear! — all I can do is be
myself and know that you are the best friend I have
ever had, and you are the royal person, the leader, the

178

one who was the chief person in your life story, and
therefore in the life story of everyone else in the world,
you who reigned with dignity and compassion}

The crust of the earth rams into itself, and plates
break on the kitchen floor. The center of the earth
reaches out to the outside of the atmosphere, and the
ocean rushes into the new deep. The steam and ash
fill the air with noise, and the cities run like eggs into
the sea, and the people cry out in terror and confu¬
sion, and in calm and in great love and compassion,
and I say to you: you can be anyone and you can be
anyone. You can even be yourself: and yourself can be
anyone. Can you hear over the din and roar of every¬
one’s apocalypse, each individual losing their grip on
the edge of life, wherever they are on the edge of life,
over the din and roar of the end of the world, all the
things that are understandably and legitimately and
unnecessarily the end of the world to you? Can you
hear small voices asking “What’s for dinner?”

My time is short, I am growing weary, somehow I will
break my glasses on the pavement — I know this — I
will fall out of the car in my sleep and land on the
pavement and my glasses will fall off my face, and I
will stare: unconscious, not asleep. They’ll take me for
dead, and you will have to carry on without me,
though I am not dead, I am only asleep, and I will rise
again, with the same body, but with a new, impaired,
simplified consciousness. And that is why you need to
pay great attention to what I am saying}

179

But I do not wish to frighten you, death does not
frighten me and so I forget that it frightens you, but I
do not wish to frighten you. In fact, I will live to a
ripe old age, my injuries will not kill me, yet I am go¬
ing to die, or have already died, yet I am going to live
to a ripe old age. This is how you will live too, when
you set out on the muddy road that leads over the
saddle, into the other valley, which leads out to the
badlands, which then leads to the other mountain
range, which you will cross in your sleep and in your
numbness and starvation, and which will then deposit
you on the coastal plain which will lead you down to
the port city that you have only heard of in songs,
and you will get on your ship and set sail, a final
hardship of seasickness and then, with sea legs, you
will roll back and forth below deck and settle in to
sleep, awaiting your further orders wherever it is you
land, your other career and your other fatigue}

It is the vigil of the night of the 23rd of July, 20—.

I awoke this morning to a day at work, and then I re¬
turned home at night to review a pile of mail and to
check the voice mail on my home phone. I heard a
voice I hadn’t heard in a long time (that is, several
months, my months are like your years). It was the

180

voice of my brother, sounding a little bit off, saying
that there was something important for me and him
and all of the family to talk about, and that if it were
possible, I should drive over the mountain pass this
weekend in order to have this important discussion
face to face, a collective meeting}

Once we arrived, it turned out that he had been diag¬
nosed with a certain kind of cancer of the digestive
tract, which was at just the stage where he had an
equal chance of living (as long as any cancer survivor
lives) and dying. We first digested that news, and
looked at each other and at him, and then he said,
“Being as I am a practical man, I thought and I
thought through this last night and early this morn¬
ing, and I prayed, although I do not know the will of
God, but I did pray, and I do know what I want, and
what I believe will accomplish God’s purposes. I
talked this over with my wife” (that is, my sister-in-
law) “and she will have her own thing to say when I
have said my words. I talked this over with my chil¬
dren” (ages 21 and 23) “and they have declined to say
anything other than that they agree with my course of
action}

“I have long thought about the issues of what it means
for a whole to love its parts, and a part to love its
whole, and for the whole to love another whole. I have
looked at the beauty of the parts, the families and
cities, of our beautiful and orderly nation caring
within themselves, even the nation caring for the na-

181

tion, but our intransigent and intractable world is ig¬
nored — this is what I see. We only love what loves us
in return and is of our kind. I am speaking at all lev¬
els of organization, and I am speaking in general, I
know that there are exemplary exceptions. I have con¬
sidered what it would be like for one man to love the
whole world. I think of my master, Jesus, and his ex¬
ample, a man who was in the position to love the
whole world, not just in action, but also in his heart,
as he had compassion on the multitudes. Jesus gave
his life for the world, and he in fact, through that, was
capable of performing a strange and yet apparently
necessary action, which we still do not fully under¬
stand, but which somehow enables us to return to
God and look him in the eye, survive his presence.

And I see that as I have the opportunity to die, and
the luxury to think about how it is that I will die, and
the time to dispose of my life intentionally, that I may
here emulate the man that I follow, and perform some
kind of action as an expression of my love for the
world:

“When I was younger, I agreed with the people who
said ‘It is so hard to love abstractions, or multitudes.’
and yet I rebelled as well, and I tried to call things
that were not, things that were. I knew that what I
desired was necessary, yet impossible, and yet I longed
for it to be possible. And in fact, I think that in part
— although the whole story is a mystery — in part,
my very desire to hold onto the possibilities, in the
face of apparent and present reality, to hold onto and

182

to even love, with my imagination, things, people, who
could barely be imagined, that this connected me to
all the people of the world, I stretched myself mentally
until I could love what might be and what may be,
rather than confining myself to what definitely was
and what I could see. Some of you saw in my life an
inability to be practical, and this has cost me in my
business and marriage, but for all that it cost me, it
causes me to connect to this being that exists and
melts away, that is human but has no face, the multi¬
tude}

“I began with the idea that I should love, the bare as¬
sertion ‘These people are valuable.’ and then I began
that next and incomplete phase of a dry-hearted, will-
and intellect-oriented process of figuring out all the
‘solutions’ to all the ‘problems’ that exist in the world.
And I certainly have not thrown away that phase, nor
the assertion that preceded it, the bare assertion of
value}

“As time went on, my curiosity, running on the rails of
a different track, dove me into philosophy and art,
pursuits that I did not understand, neither did I un¬
derstand what I was experiencing, nor did I under¬
stand their value. And I prayed to a God whom I did
not understand, not just to Jesus, my master, but to
the Father, that alien being. And I lost my bearings,
and my mind found everything to be slippery, and ev¬
erything indistinct, and in this mist (you all thought I
was depressed and stunned) I could see new shapes, I

183

was enabled to see things that did not have details,
and which did not make sense according to my old
eyes. This was a purely intellectual and aesthetic un¬
derstanding, and yet it was a prefiguring of a real
birth of love in my heart, the opening of my spiritual
eyes.-

“I ran along on my own track, considering how it
could be that, like God, I could love the whole world,
and how it was that I could give myself, who am so
much like my own son, in order to bless it, if not save
it. I found myself raising my son and daughter, I
found myself loving my wife, but there was still within
me this longing to long, this longing to love the whole
world, as it is the world. And one day I noticed that I
had always loved the world, my world, my very own,
my people and my people’s people, that this was my
household, my great kinship, this untouchable and
half-intelligible cloud. We were all strangers on this
earth, longing for home, since we had no home, we
had everything in common. Though this was just a vi¬
sion, this universal homelessness, it was certainly the
vision that I regarded)

“And so now, at my current age, I have an attach¬
ment, an affection for, this world, a compassion for it,
a desire to see it prosper. Somehow I have a compas¬
sion for my wife and children, and for myself, through
this very compassion, and somehow I have a compas¬
sion for the stories that I read in the church bulletin,
of a distant cancer, or in the letters sent out by the

184

charities I support, of a distant starvation. I love what
is unreal:

“And so now, in my current condition, my current sit¬
uation, I want to make the beginning of a final ges¬
ture. I consider how it is that in our mighty rectangle,
that we spend great sums of money, 5 or 10 years’
wages, in order to defeat cancer, put it at bay for
some time, at least. And I see how it is that 5 or 10
years’ wages could be distributed among the very poor
of the world, how it could save the lives of hundreds
or thousands of those poor, with simple medical inter¬
ventions and agricultural improvements, how it could
even be spent on contraceptives, or small-scale en¬
trepreneurship, for a different and perhaps more long¬
term benefit. And I think to myself ‘Am I really worth
that much? Or would I be more happy for these
brothers and sisters — these abstractions — to ab¬
stractly and in an unreal way be really helped?’ I am
sure that I am worth a lot. But I love these people, I
love them when I first meet them, out on the streets
where they beg, I love them when I get to know them
at church, and go on their adventures in trying to live
as a poor person, I love them on the bus, when they
talk with such friendliness to people they have just
met. I love these people as possibilities and as realities
and as they transition between one and the other. So I
have decided to sacrifice my life out of joy, to give
away something small in order to get something
big}

185

“The execution of this — and I do not know if it will
succeed — is this. I will start a website, a blog, some¬
thing — or one of you will, and I will publicize my
cause. I am a man with cancer. And yet I also have a
request or a demand, which goes to my insurance
company. I will say ‘Let us gather as men and women
of business. I have faithfully paid my insurance premi¬
ums for the last 20 years. And here is my great payout
to come, my 5 or 10 years’ wages of cancer treatments
— estimate it as whatever you will, employ your hon¬
est actuaries. Would this be preferable, that you
spend 90% of that money on the poor, and keep 10%?
Or perhaps you would even prefer to spend 95% on
the poor and keep 5%? And let us gather as men and
women of conscience, would not you prefer to bless
the many rather than the one? And let us gather as
men and women of cynicism, breathing in and out the
air of corruption (I hope that God has mercy on us),
will this not make it look as though you have a heart
and soul, as a company?’ And I will say this publicly,
and you will help me to make this known, so that the
company knows that it has something to gain and lose
from one man’s request)

“And I hope that this can succeed, that the insurance
company will say ‘How can we do otherwise? Why
shouldn’t we do this?’ or that if there is some kind of
struggle over it, that I shall prevail. And then this
money will go to the charities that are most trustwor¬
thy, and I shall die as having climbed to the top of a
mountain.)’

186

He concluded his speech and his wife, my sister-in-law,
spoke. “Every calling has a cost, and I am the one who
will bear the greatest cost. This man who has been
my second self for many years is now going to leave
me with many years ahead of me. I know that I will
live, and triumph, in the years to come, but now I will
triumph in my loneliness and grief, rather than in my
greatest flourishing. And yet I would rather that my
husband be permitted to be himself, to be his full self,
to love as he best sees fit, to love the world as much
as he loves me, to love me by leaving his beauty be¬
hind for me to cry in, to weep in the beauty that he
leaves by leaving me behind for this other world, to go
to this other world, where he is, to me, a word and a
memory and a spirit, rather than a man of flesh,
whom I can hold at night, and whom I can see with
my own eyes. And so I know that I have much to do,
and much time to spend with him, and much to do for
his legacy, and much stress and crying, and please
support me in all this. That is all.”

We stood, trying to process all that we had just
heard, and found ourselves in the arms of each other,
and parting from each other, and talking, and falling
silent. And we gathered at the table and ate together,
although my brother ate less, and ate with displea¬
sure}

He had some time, although of course, as it was to be
untreated, we did not know how much, and we found

187

an urgency in our visits to him. I traveled over the
mountain pass at least twice a month, on weekends.
Early on, he tried to take care of the “unimportant”
things, the things that he didn’t really care about and
so could not be bothered to deal with when he was in
more pain. His wife and I settled his accounts with
him, and he spent an afternoon distributing all of his
possessions among his friends, keeping only what he
needed for his final approach:

We proceeded with our appeals to the insurance com¬
pany, who yielded quickly — almost, somehow, too
quickly — and who sent the sum over on the day after
my brother died. At his deathbed there were his wife
and children, myself, and L. and S., who drove over
the mountain pass, and some other of the relatives
who lived in the area, and a few of his long-time
friends’.-

Now it has been a few years, time has passed, we have
moved along, but we have never forgotten, he is never
dead to us, we think of him as both a memory and a
possibility-

It was a long day today, all the hiking up hills and the
careful procession down the valleys, no need to trip
and fall and slide into a bush, now, is there? We sit
soaking our feet at the old tavern, set in the hills of
the mountains, in the little valley where our greatest
river emerges from the earth as a stream, between two
of the saddles, near the mountain pass, up 8,000 feet,

188

we are worn out from the altitude and the dust, and it
is the end of the evening of the 24th of July, 20—.

One time when I was the sea-god Poseidon, I saw the
most beautiful woman in the whole world, serving at
the temple of Athena, and I started to trip out about
her, like, whoa!!!! but then I imagined what it would
be like to have a conversation with her, in person, how
I would have nothing to say, and there would be noth¬
ing but nothingness between us, and I stopped being a
Greek god and I went back to cleaning the temple
steps.-

I pulled an all-nighter one time, working on a clock. I
don’t know what I was thinking. I should have worked
on it ahead of time. Haha, I know, that was a pun
there. Anyway, it’s possible that Pm working on that
clock right now. A clock is a way to pass time, of
course. I’ve got some gears here that I’m locking to¬
gether, so the whole thing will turn around in circles
together. How beautiful, to think of this thing build¬
ing up to the fatal and wonderful event, of a long
chime on the hour, and even once a day the dance of a
lonesome soldier and his faithful dog'.-

Back when our city had a state of the art light rail
system, I rode over to the horse stables on the west

189

side of town and from there rode out into the western
desert, where I saw the desert flowers in bloom. I
picked one of the most beautiful and wished that I
could have told someone about it, so I’m telling you
now, •[Si-

People ask me about my name tag, which has my
name written on it. “Why do you always wear a name
tag?” they ask. I say to them, “I don’t know, it’s a
habit that I picked up from someone I met at a con¬
vention.” So they keep asking me about it and I say,
“Okay, people, Pm going to track that person down.”
So I go to the next year’s occurrence of that conven¬
tion, and now Pm trying to remember who it was who
taught me that, I think he was a guy with brown hair,
that’s what I remember, about my height, that is, av¬
erage height. And I think he wore glasses. No, I could
be wrong about that, maybe he didn’t:

One time I sat on the north side of a rock
waiting for moss to grow on it.

And I got tired of waiting,
so I decided to
write a letter to you,

but that took too long so I just went over to
knock on your door,
and before you opened it
up,

I saw you

through your window
walking

190

to the door
to open it up}

I played the calliope once on a steam ship. This was
back when steam ships regularly plied the waters off
the southern shore of our glorious nation. I was a
good calliope player, but I was no match for Barton,
the great Barton, who showed me that I needed to
quit and go back home and work at some other line of
work, although I could have continued and made a liv¬
ing on that steamship for many years before the in¬
vention of the phonograph record}

I learned to ski when I was 35 years old. Before that, I
had never seen snow before, but I drove inland to the
great interior mountains, and settled for one of the
8,000 foot mountains, saving for some later time the
10,000 foot and even the 15,000 foot mountains. I
know that I may never get to those peaks, or, shall I
be more specific, their slopes, but I know that I
should always save something for later, just in case, to
preserve the infinity of the universe}

A gong played one time and I heard it clear on the
other end of the university campus where I was study¬
ing meditation. It made me think about all the other
messages being sent by the universe, and how just be¬
cause they weren’t named as messages, we don’t hear
them. Does that make sense? At the university, the
gong was saying “It’s time to gather for meditations
and a meal of millet and steamed kale.” but at the

191

university there was also the call of a flock of crows,
which said “There are crows flying around.” and also
the sound of people whispering in class, and the sound
of construction going on at the west side of campus,
and also the rumble of the great qi generator in the
center of campus, from which we derive all of our in¬
telligence and inner drive’.-

I picked up the phone and heard that it was one of
those telemarketer computers trying to sell me some¬
thing. Because I spaced out, I heard the whole pitch,
and yet did not really understand what it said. Then I
hung up and started walking around my apartment,
thinking of something unrelated. Then I put on my
shoes and went outside and talked to some people I
knew, some neighbors of mine. They invited me in
and I listened to their newest vinyls and also saw their
pet fish. Then I went outside and wondered what the
point of my life was. And then someone came to me
with a petition to sign, and I signed it. And then I left
the apartment complex entirely and walked over to
the train station, and I rode the train down to a lec¬
ture hall I knew of, to see what kind of lectures were
being given, you never know, anybody could be there,
and a guy started to lecture about how people in
other places are starving, and though I’d heard it a
million times before, this time, the guy’s warm man¬
ner and his simple speech, somehow triggered in my
brain that there is more to my life than all this aim¬
lessness, but I went home and didn’t think about it
for another 3 years, during which time I floated

192

through life aimlessly, at least that’s what people said,
but to me I was getting a lot of important things done
in my head:

I was lying in a hammock, wondering when someone
would come save me from my poverty, and then I
heard on the radio an intrusion from a pirate station
flying overhead in a zeppelin, flying over the border
from the rich country, and it had this guy saying
“Don’t wait for a rich person to save you from poverty,
take responsibility for yourself, pull yourself up by
your own bootstraps! This is what all the really, really
excellent people did. You want to be like them, right?
Not some whiney sissy.” And it worked, it really did. I
started a business, succeeded, and started feeling jus¬
tified when the people from my country suffered:

I flipped on the light to my house and like magic I
could see what was inside. I walked around and made
use of several of the items in my house because I
could. This was reality to me, the use of items. Then I
sat down and breathed slowly and the nature of real¬
ity to me was-. And then I stopped breathing

slowly and got up and cleaned the house. And then
you came in the door and the nature of reality was
your face. And then you left and the nature of reality
was what it really was, which was reading a book un¬
til I was so tired that I went to bed and lay there
thinking about you and when we would be together
again and then I wound up staying up all night listen¬
ing to my favorite band, cutting out stuff from the

f93

newspaper and pasting it into a collage, for what rea¬
son, I cannot say, but maybe the nature of reality is
how I never have to work a job anymore, and I never
have to sleep anymore, and I can go for a walk when¬
ever I want, and I can travel wherever I want, and
stay wherever I want, and I want, I want, I want.
Well, to be honest, I don’t know what the nature of
reality -Is’.-

It is past the witching hour, I think, if I remember
when that is exactly, this very early morning of the
25th of July, 20—.

S., do you know God? If not, I'll tell you something.
When I look toward him, it’s like when I look at you,
but then turn away, perhaps awkwardly, so that I can
say what I need to say. And I can’t just stare at you,
perhaps I shouldn’t, but with God it’s like I crane my
neck and what I see is beautiful, but it’s not com¬
pelling, God never compels, at least, not in my reality.
There’s a freedom to my love of him, but it requires
work to remember him. I guess that’s the tradeoff I
live with)

I was living in a hut and some days I was happy, and
other days I was sick, and finally, I was very sick, with
vomiting and diarrhea all day long. I was bewildered

194

and very tired, and I was in misery and agony. A doc¬
tor came to visit our town and she gave me oral rehy¬
dration therapy, and this gave me some strength, and
eventually I recovered. I suppose now I have an immu¬
nity to whatever pathogen I had? And I look around
this town I live in, and I think how lucky I am to live,
with all the people I love still present to my living
view, and yet at the same time I am a helpless
child:

I picked up a rock out in the desert, and observed
that it was hot from the sun and that it was round
and dense. Perhaps in some other age, this rock had
been deposited by a stream somewhere, it had the
roundness and smoothness of a rock from a stream.
What was it doing down here in the desert? Or rather,
perhaps, what was the desert doing here? I turned to
look out across the desert and saw in the distance a
grove of date palms, within a few hours’ walking dis¬
tance. I looked out in the other direction and saw a
small town, a place where tourists spend the night. I
looked out in yet another direction and saw where I
had camped, underneath a pile of boulders. “Here I
am,” I prayed, “Right in the center of your will.”

One time, when I was out in the islands with my
friend L., we went snorkeling and found a small group
of sea turtles. We followed behind them, hoping to
find where they lived. The sea turtles “led us” (or not,
who knows what they intended?) around a small cape,
to a medium-sized cove, and there we saw three amaz-

195

ingly beautiful women sunbathing. We got out of the
water and they said “Hello, come sit with us.” And we
sat with them and they said “Try this coconut water,
it’s very refreshing.” And so it was. And they said
nothing else, and we sat and wondered if they had
anything to say on the inside, each of us, without say¬
ing it out loud. And eventually the women stood up
and took up their beach towels and walked away from
the beach, back up in the rocks above the cove, and
we waved goodbye. And L. and I sat there in the dim¬
ming light, deciding to forego our hotel room for the
night, talking of all the things that had happened in
our shared past, and in our individual lives up to that
point:

One time, a meteorite came flashing down out of the
sky and struck the slum at the edge of town. There
was a terrible explosion and fire and all the fire trucks
of the town barrelled and whooped their way to their
engagement with the flames. Poor people scattered
and a lot of filth got cooked. The place was in ruins,
and after everything had cleared up, they built a
tourist attraction around the crater, and they built fat
apartment blocks to replace the slum, and some of the
poor people lived in the apartment blocks, and some
wound up in the new slum that sprouted up several
miles away, where there had been a wooded river bot¬
tom.-

As I get older, I find that things keep getting taken
away from me, for instance, my time. I used to have

f96

time to do just about everything I felt compelled to
do, and which gave me joy. There was such a thing as
homework, and then work, but I always had time for
the people who mattered most to me. And now as I
get older, I find relationships drifting away from me,
and I’m helpless, because somehow I just don’t have
time anymore. I don’t know how this happens, how it
is by doing so many things, I end up being less and
less able to do what it is I really want to do}

I never understand peoples’ reactions to what I say.
One day I wanted to be a water Indian so I said out
loud “Time to go put on my water moccasins!” and
people were flipping out and I didn’t understand. Did
I say something bad? Another time I was talking
about something I really cared about, about how peo¬
ple don’t know anything and are stuck in this predica¬
ment of still having to live their lives, and people
laughed. Huh? And so I go through life. I wonder,
what is it that people see in reality?

One time when I was a dog in a dogsled team, we
climbed over the snowy expanse of a long rise up in
the southernmost part of the world, the great land of
the south where hardbitten people go to be alone, and
I was really tired and I was also a dog so I kept going
because I knew the dogs in front of me and the dogs
behind me and I responded to the wishes of the man
who was riding in the sled. We settled in for the night
and all of us dogs huddled together, and the man lay
down next to us, and it was a clear night, and I could

197

see the stars up above].-

I was doing dishes last night, looking down at those
pans and bowls, which had been left for the last few
days, a smell developing, the food drying onto the ves¬
sels. I scrubbed and scrubbed, clearing out all the
things that I had eaten, feeling the shame of my up¬
bringing and early education, the way people had
looked on me as someone to coddle and take into
hand and themselves as the mature adults, the ones
who deserve, and expect themselves, to impose their
will, the way I cared about my own pride but I wasn’t
supposed to care, but I did anyway and that was even
more shame, how everything was taken away from me
and I couldn’t escape the chessboard, the chess game,
that everyone had been playing with me without me
realizing it, all those years, that even though I am far
away, the game is still being played in my head and I
am limited by all the moves that could cause me to be
checkmated. Perhaps if I lose, then all will be over,
and yet the chess game would continue, continue to be
begun by those who take to chess, challenging the
people who don’t know any better, leaving the game
inside their minds, the game will continue. The chess
game is an objective reality that I can’t shake, even
though I know that the players of the game are simply
beasts flailing against their own fate, fearsome ma¬
chines that on the inside are just a few gears creaking
along, but they are gone and the chess game remains,
that game which machines can play so well, that game
that I don’t even like, and which I am not even inter-

198

ested in, that game is still alive in me, pawn chain
castle your king knights to the center of the board and
things have devolved beyond my level of chess strat¬
egy and I can see the board in its particularity, with
all the particular pieces setting up their particular
web and I really just want to throw the board out the
window and bash the pieces with a hammer, and go
outside and tear that board to pieces, and burn every¬
thing, but I’m trying to do that while playing the
game itself, because the rules of the game only permit
that I move pawns forward a space (or two as they
start), they capture one space diagonally, and knights
make their tours and bishops take their color, and
queens can do anything quickly and kings anything
slowly and rooks take their rank and file and everyone
makes one move at a time. But like I was when I was
four years old, I don’t want to play this losing game
anymore, I want to finally show my anger and my re¬
jection of the people who implied to me that chess
was the thing, chess was cool, chess was what people
do with their time, and it is in the nature of this chess
game that if I tear up the board and go outside, that I
have set myself up for checking and checkmate, that
this game encompasses itself, a closed loop of people
winning because I am going to lose, because I have to
acknowledge chess, which is their way of winning, forc¬
ing me to play their game and excel at the skills and
dispositions that I find heartbreaking, or I will con¬
tinue to suffer, at the mercy of their programming, the
infestation that I cannot eradicate from my house.

This is the chess of chess. And then I finished the

199

dishes and was at a loss for what to do, knowing that
sleep would not come to me)

It is the calm and quiet and sealed-off morning of the
25th of July, 20—.

And yet I know that when things are impossible, the
Lord is near. I know that when there are no paths, the
only possible path is the Way. I am speaking for my¬
self, perhaps the reality is different for you, consult
your own experience and report to the world what you
find. I know that the person who I am is one who is
compelled by the paths, the preferential pathways, the
ways the water flows where it has flowed until some¬
thing dams it up and it carves a new waterway. I can
see myself, as in a mirror, I can see that I am prone to
wander, to look down at the grass as I graze — a
sheep can do little more — and yet I must incline my
ear for my shepherd. I am a sheep of the good shep¬
herd. I am not a winner or a loser, a thinker or a
doubter, a friend or an enemy, a lover or a hater, a
writer or a reader, no, I am none of those things. I am
not the person who I think I am, and I am not the
person who you say I am. I am a sheep of the good
shepherd, and in this simplicity, I am at peace, and in
this peace, I can be loved)

I took my son out to the backyard to teach him some¬
thing important. He’s six years old, which is perhaps
young for this lesson, but perhaps not. There is a les¬
son in being taught something too young. I gave him

200

the hammer and the nails and I told him, “Okay, son,
I’ve got something I’d like you to build, and I want
you to be very careful as you build it. I'd like to give
this gift to your mother for her birthday, but I need
your help. Can you do this?” And he said “What are
we making?” And I said “A birdhouse. That way your
mother can look out the window as she daydreams at
the table, and see birds up close to the house.” And he
said “Alright.” And I got the pieces out, which I’d
sawed on a previous afternoon, and held them in
place, and told him to nail in the nails. “You have to
hold the nail, and be careful, and don’t hit your fin¬
ger, but you have to hit harder than that.” He was
somewhat bewildered by this mixture of imperatives:
Do what Dad says, Don’t hit your finger, Hit harder.
Eventually I added to his plate the imperative to Try
and make it go in straight. After a while, and a cer¬
tain amount of concentration on his part, and sus¬
pense on my part, we had in our hands a birdhouse,
and my son looked at me and said, “I made that bird-
house! I did it solely by my own efforts, without any
help from anyone! I am the greatest! Bow before my
hammer!” And now the real work of education began,
as I laid bare to him how everything we do is prede¬
termined by the way the Big Bang happened. And he
said “What about God?” and I said “You thought you
were God just a minute ago. Who are you to save
yourself from determinism using this ‘God’ word?”
And my son said “Are you God?” and I told him,

“No.” and then he drew himself up to his full height, 6
foot 1 inch, and said “Then I don’t have to do any-

201

thing you say” and he walked out and got himself a
job and an apartment, and only visited once a year.
And then I got old and sick and he started coming
around more, trying to make up for all that lost time.
And he asked me about God again. And I said, “Ask
your mother when she’s doing the bills, paying for all
this technology that’s keeping me alive.” And he came
up to her, somehow able to arrive at the moment of
bill-paying, something she did not normally do in
front of other people. And he heard her saying “Does
not your Father in heaven feed the sparrows, which
are here today and gone tomorrow? So then, do you
likewise.” and he looked out at the window at the
birdhouse he had made a few months ago, all by him¬
self, out of nothing. And he was bewildered to see all
of the past and present and future coming together
into the one moment, his mother before him writing,
his father in another room passing away. And at this
moment he cried, and I picked him up and began to
cry with him, as though I was the one who hit my fin¬
ger with the hammer, my moment just as full as
his)

Eight is my favorite number. I don’t know why. Is it
because of octopuses or octagons? Maybe so. I do like
octopuses, octagons and octahedra, but that might be
because eight is my favorite number. My favorite color
is blue. I know where that comes from. The sky is
blue. I have always been enchanted by the sky, by the
thought of being up there, way up high, without any¬
thing below me, not falling, not flying, perhaps float-

202

ing, but best of all just beholding, and not focused
necessarily on the ground, although I might give that
a glance from time to time, rather on the clouds, if
there were any, or best of all, on the blue itself, the
sky of the sky. There’s something of that feeling that I
get on a hot summer day, when I’m washing the car,
or when I am parked on the edges of the great ravines
in the interior of our magnificent land, playing music
of flutes and rattles on my car speakers, sipping on a
sparkling water, with my kids reading out loud, in
their deliberate way, materials provided by the park
rangers’.-

I actually found a sundial but I can’t read it very well
so I think it’s the afternoon now, but maybe it’s the
late morning of the 25th of July, 20—.

My arm hurts. I think it’s from playing baseball the
other day down at the park with my friends. Cur¬
rently, my friends consist of my brother, that neigh¬
borhood girl who thinks we’re really cool [Note from
future self: eventually became my sister-in-law], and
that other neighborhood kid, S. [a boy, not the same
S. as I’m usually talking about.] The way we play
baseball, there are two people on each team, and we
go find a backstop that nobody’s using, and the
pitcher pitches to the batter, and we just let the ball

203

hit the backstop, the batter throws it back to the
pitcher and there’s one outhelder. We started out try¬
ing to have four bases, but now we just have first base
and home base, because we decided we didn’t want to
have ghost runners. No ghost runners for us’.-

We put first base behind the pitcher, where second
base would normally be. Pretty soon, we drew a circle
around the pitcher in the dirt and established that
you had to run around the circle so that you didn’t
tend to run into the pitcher on the way to first base.
We put a fair amount of effort into making baseball
work for us, given the constraints of having only four
players. Pm pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished,
but still, my arm hurts. I was trying to throw out
some good, fast pitches. I watch baseball on TV, so I
have some concept of what a pitch is supposed to look
like. My brother played a season of Little League, but
he wasn’t a pitcher and he never pays attention to
anything anyway, so he doesn’t really know how to
pitch. My accuracy could use some work, which is
something I acknowledge, but S., in all his neighbor¬
hood-kid annoyingness, is always ragging me on it. His
accuracy is probably as good as mine, but it’s hard to
tell. He claims he’s definitely better than me. I wanted
to record statistics on it, but then he called me a
nerd. So what do I do? Pm kind of at a loss. [Future
self: I will not consider just not hanging out with S.,
even though it would kind of make sense.] Anyway,
it’s fun playing baseball. Yesterday that neighborhood
girl was talking about playing soccer. What is this

204

soccer thing, I wonder? Apparently it involves kicking
a ball around. Okay, that might be cool. I don’t know.
We’ll just have to see.-

It’s been a while since Grandfather R. passed away,
but I think about him all the time. I have a photo¬
graph of him and me, hanging up on my bulletin
board in my room. He has a frugal, resourceful, clever
face, he has that passionate look, that gentleness. It’s
all in his face, all in this one photograph. It’s really
amazing how it is that at the right moment, almost a
whole person’s personality can be contained in the
right photograph. I think of how hard he drove him¬
self, about the nights he would stay up praying, how
we didn’t even realize that’s what he was doing, how
our parents hardly knew. Such a man of secrets. I sup¬
pose that a holy man has to be a man of secrets, to
conceal his religiosity from other people. Grandfather
tended to have empty pockets, when we grandchildren
would come, but he could always listen. No gifts, he
wasn’t even particularly fun, but we knew that he was
a safe person to go to when we skinned our knees or
got in a dispute. Even in my young adulthood, my
own age of secrets, I found myself divulging even a
few of my own to Grandfather R. It seemed as though
he could understand everyone — not that he was very
much like most other people, but that he saw in each
of us a deeper side that was the same, or maybe it
was like he was struck by and connected to us,
through that very misfortune of no one being like any¬
one else — but I don’t know, I’m trying to explain af-

205

ter the fact a feeling that I had when I was younger,
that I could never have put into words at the time,
and now as my memories fade or are codified into a
story, the Story of Grandfather R., as it were, I think
I’m in danger of just making something up, which re¬
flects the things I’ve learned and experienced over the
years, myself, rather than what the actual reality of
his way of relating was’.-

I remember the funeral. We had the whole family
over, his whole side, of course, but even some of the
in-laws would come too, in-laws who had come to
know him, not through a profusion of words, but
through some helpful action he had performed for
them, maybe fixing their farm equipment, or tending
to a sick animal, complete with one or two simple con¬
versations, setting something to rights, or transmitting
some vision of solidity and clarity. He was a passion¬
ate man, and saw great significance in everyday life,
he could put a lot of love into a few sentences!

At the funeral, we sang his favorite hymns (and some
of our own favorites, of course), and had a speech
given, and a time for sharing memories of him — just
as at any other funeral. We dressed in black, not to
mourn him, but because he was a mourning man, and
we were sad, not of his loss (primarily), but because
sadness was his life, we were sad for our sins, sad for
the way that we forsake our God every day. My
brother and I went up on stage and even talked about
what he’d meant to us, and though we did not cry, we

206

were as quiet as we’d ever been, that was the moment
we learned speechlessness firsthand, and the audience
learned a taste of it as well, as neither of us could
speak for something like 30 seconds before we said
what we had intended to say

I'm relaxing right now, by the river which runs at the
back of my property. I’m looking out at the things
that flow by, it’s an easy afternoon, and I see branches
and boats coming by, I think there was some flooding
a few days ago while I was over in the desert. S. calls
me up on my cell phone and I answer her. She says
that she has something she wants to tell me in person,
and I say “Well, I’m relaxing here at home, by the
river. Is this a thing you would want to tell me here?”
And she says “No, let’s meet at a coffeeshop, this is
more of a coffeeshop thing.” So we arrange to meet,
and I get myself out of my chair and go inside and I
don’t even really wonder what she’s going to tell me,
not that I have any idea what it is she’ll say

I arrive at the coffeeshop and we sit and I can see that
there is sadness on her face. She says “I have to move
to” a city practically on the other end of the conti¬
nent. I look at her and think about how things come
and things go, about how the wind blows us, and how
it deposits us in great piles, like a loess bluff, and it
scatters us far and abroad, so that the rare earth min¬
erals in us get into the food of everyone (hopefully
we’re carrying around with us the beneficial rare earth
metals, those elusive micronutrients). I say to her,

207

“Well, there’s always the phone.” and she says “Yeah,
but it’s not the same.” The way she says it is both
light and sad. I know her well enough to hear every¬
thing she’s feeling in that statement. And yet, while
this is the death of — something — I know that there
is no such thing as death, that just as she blew into
my life on the breeze, that she should blow out of my
life, and yet we will certainly meet again later, com¬
pletely by chance, for no reason at all except that ev¬
erything is going to happen, and happen over and
over again, yet everything, as it happens again and
again, is going to be made new. I knew this to be the
case with her, as I see her, every year, drawing closer
and closer to the state of trusting and being trustwor¬
thy, living in peace, and I see eternal life growing in
her'.-

My sister-in-law is sad to hear the news as well, from
over the mountain pass. She drives over it fairly often
to meet with us, to remember my brother with me.

She has come to see S. before she leaves, and we sit on
my property, over by the river, and watch the trees
cast their shadows on the current at the edge of the
stream. There is a going forward from here, a new life,
but this new life will never have the richness of the old
life. Perhaps it will say something fresh, but whatever
it says will be subtle and dry. Although of course we
can hope that S. will move back to one of our cities,
that is always a possibility. But we have learned, as
adults, to set possibility a little bit to the side, to let
it sit on us as an uncertainty, but not to sit too heavy.

208

We can hope, but we have to keep on living our daily
lives, amongst the structures and relationships that
were not as interesting to us, but which we built into
our lives as a matter of course, tumbling toward the
future}

Of course I have thought of marrying my sister-in-law.
Of course. You’re absolutely correct in guessing that.
I’m sorry if that seems strange. I feel like there’s
something wrong there, but it isn’t really wrong. Or is
it? Or is it weird? Or is it just socially frowned-on? Or
maybe it isn’t frowned on. I don’t know what’s out
there in the social world. Should I care about the so¬
cial world or not? That’s something I’ve thought
about, ridden down, fence-rode for a long time. I don’t
know how she feels about me — of course I love her
and she loves me — but I don’t know if we were to sit
down and have an upfront conversation about it, what
kind of decision we would come to. My guess is that
we would draw close, and think, and wonder, and
then, in our souls, let go of each other and float back,
me to my interior city, she, to her coastal city, and we
would go on as widow and bachelor for years on end,
drifting and performing small kindnesses to the ran¬
dom people, and to the structures of people held to us
by logical purposes. And yet of course over there in
the coastal city, with all the people coming in and out
of the port, and settling in ethnic enclaves, making
ethnic restaurants where she could be taken on a date,
by some foreign-born person or some cultured “rectan¬
gular”, perhaps she will erode a new riverbank in her

209

life, and leap into a new valley, and have a completely
different life than she’s lived before. And yet of course
here in the interior, by my own river, I am learning as
I learned in my youth to put my roots down into the
minimalism and find down there a raw, dry, electric
love, the love of being alone with God, and putting up
my stern, strange branches, to commemorate the wild¬
ness and strangeness that I love, but which tend to
make my life difficult'.-

It is the afternoon of the 26th of July, 20—.

(S. says “Yeah, that would be kinda weird. I think for
your niece and nephew.” as though she too is disap¬
pointed that such a neat plan is not feasible — and
she says it lightly, tilting her head to the side.)

I walked down the path through the bushes and the
cane by the edge of the great swamp. This is where
the river runs down into a great deep valley, what
used to be lake, they say, but which is now a swamp.
Not all rivers reach the sea, and this one dissipates
under the hot sun, or, in wintertime, accumulates to a
certain depth, over which it is possible to float a small
boat. There I found a bottle, left by some reveller, I
first thought, but inside I found a note, a secret left
by somebody I didn’t know. I am not going to reprint

210

this secret, and I am not going to tell you the secret of
my own that I put in the bottle as well/

There’s really very little else to say or do in this town
that hasn’t already been said and done before. In our
town, we gather the brands that have burned for a
very long time and they keep burning, but a little bit
dimmer every year. This is the valley of the end times.
We have lived here in our small, sustainable commu¬
nity, for generations, as the world around us fought
and starved. We took in refugees and sent out our
skilled people to teach our neighbors. Mostly we tried
to preserve ourselves, not only our food supply and so¬
lar panels, but also our culture, our mindset, the thing
that kept us from going crazy when everybody else
did. We try to protect our valley, keep the air in it
pure and the spirits in it flowing from left to right,
and up and down, instead of from inside to outside,
and in all directions and in no directions. We know
that the earth will die out, that there will be nothing
left. We do not know how long our race will have left,
and we know that if we are diligent, and patient and
careful, and waste nothing, that we can survive proba¬
bly longer than anybody else. And we know that
maybe there’s really no point to human existence,
that perhaps it is just fine if we all die out at some
point. But we want to keep going because we believe
— somehow — that we are a witness to somebody
else, somewhere else, who knows who or where, that
at least we will have the satisfaction of knowing that
objectively speaking, We Were, we were persevering,

211

we endured)

There’s an old story that talks about this life of ours,
it was made into a movie. It’s about people living in
the desert, living off the resources. It’s about a family,
and then a town, making sense of things. We can’t
watch movies anymore because all of the things we
once used to watch movies have broken, and we do
not have the expertise to fix them at this point. We
made sure to remember how to fix the essentials for
life, but we are forgetting the older culture. We still
read books, as we come across them, but we do not
have the skill to bind books like in the old days, and
none of us are writers’.-

For the most part, we have a culture of reference. We
have our libraries and the songs we have memorized,
and which we play on our homemade guitars, flutes,
and fiddles, and the surviving accordions, glocken¬
spiels, autoharps and so on, which we no longer know
how to make, but which we prize. We have an oral
culture that has a certain background in the past, and
which does compose new poetry and new oratory, but
which largely consists of us talking about great movies
of the past, and quotes scenes from novels and re¬
counts the history of earth before the great and terri¬
ble century in which we ran out of resources:

Life is actually good in our community. We work
hard, and we’ve had a lot of dross melted off of us.

I’m speaking of the cultural dross. However, we have

212

lost a lot of people. A lot of people in our community
fled in the early days, hoping for an easier life else¬
where. We embraced the difficulty, the devotion, of re¬
source recycling early on. We do not know what hap¬
pened to all of those people. Some people couldn’t
survive here for medical reasons. I know a man in our
community, a beautiful, creative person who ran a
business and also played music, who could no longer
get his supply of psychiatric medications, and who has
had progressive spells of madness. We have done our
best with him, but he is no longer who he used to be,
and he is somewhat of a burden — but we have
promised to keep him as one of our own, because we
are a community that endures suffering, and we do so
because of love.-

We receive dreams from God as we sleep. These
dreams, so say our prophetic young men and young
women, speak of a time and a place where we will all
work and endure, but in which God will reign visibly,
of a time and place where all will know that the true
nature of lived experience is in growth, putting forth
leaves, putting forth good works, drinking in good wa¬
ter, tapping into the source of cleanliness, tapping into
God, drawing God out of the earth, putting forth
leaves for the birds, putting forth fruit, drawing God
into the fruit, producing richness out of God, becom¬
ing one with God, adding ourselves to God and be¬
coming clean, losing branches that do not produce,
gaining branches that produce, growing, growing
closer, drawing in the birds, giving shelter to children,

213

angels perhaps, who are too innocent to be trees
themselves, nurturing a new life. This is what their
dreams speak of, and we imagine a king ruling over a
kingdom, and people being taught by teachers, and
some kind of government that governs, and people in¬
venting inventions for everyone, and people producing
artworks for everyone. We imagine a world that has a
beautiful spirit, that is ruled by love, and is growing
in love, and has picked up all of the giant dome of cul¬
ture that preceded the resource depletion, and lifted it
up again by all the strength of this new prosperity un¬
der the new regime. These are the things that we
imagine to ourselves, which were not received as
dreams by our holy youths!

There are sirens calling, as sirens always do, wailing
about death, not seducing anyone, as they have grown
into mature beings, and there are cars running about
their purposes, in this city in which we live. It is the
late afternoon of the 26th of July, 20—.

I watched a movie today, I’m not going to tell you
which one. (I’m going to make you guess.) Anyway,
this movie is about an old cowboy who rides around,
slumped in depression. And then there’s this young
cowboy who wants to remind him of how great he
used to be, and that he should go out there and round

214

up The Wild Bunch — not a gang of robbers, but a
herd of the roughest, nastiest cattle that ever roamed
the West. That only he could do it, that only he could
stare down the Old Bull and win. I tell you, that
movie was ridiculous. I felt myself sinning with
ridicule while I watched it, then, the Holy Spirit came
on me and I just relaxed and watched it as what it
was, a series of still images flickering on the movie
theater wall 24 times a second, depicting some sort of
imaginary reality, some sort of dream that I could
take as being visual, visual-as-visual, and spiritual, as
a message from God:

There was a line in the movie where the young cow¬
boy said, “What’s the use of your sadness? Did sad¬
ness get you anywhere?” And the old cowboy breaks
down and cries, and the young cowboy gets mad at
him and the old cowboy just keeps on crying, and the
whole thing is just terribly ridiculous, if you’re in¬
clined to ridicule. But I was not ridiculing, I looked on
the screen and felt a deep compassion for the old guy,
stuck as he was in this ridiculous movie with ridicu-re-
ality filters coming over every heart in the audience,
people audibly and intelligibly making fun of this
movie as I watched, and this not even at midnight,
and not even at the hippest theater in towm'.-

I just wanted to rush into the world of the movie, and
give the old guy a hug, or I guess that wouldn’t be
manly enough, maybe say to him “Hey old pardner, I
got you covered, that ol’ Wild Bunch will be a cinch if

215

you and me team up.” And it’s not like I’m the great¬
est cowboy or anything (although in real life I’ve had
some experience on Grandfather R.’s ranch), but more
like, I don’t care if we don’t get the Wild Bunch, and
I don’t care if we get gored by bulls, I want to be
gored by bulls alongside that old cowboy, I want to be
there with him in his weeping and in his failure. If the
price of that is bravery, and rounding up a bunch of
cattle in the hot sun, and actually succeeding and the
old cowboy gets to retire west of the border where his
lost girlfriend will turn out to be, then so be it. That
is the price I’m willing to pay.-

Anyway, that was that movie that I watched tonight,
or maybe last night. I’m trying to forget it already,
but I am afraid it will take a few months. But maybe
I want to remember it, because I want to remember
that old cowboy, weeping in the saddle. I think, in
those moments where you feel something strongly, and
something happened to make you feel that way, or
your imagination kicks in, or something like that, that
those are moments when life is meaningful, when God
is talking to you. So I try to listen, even if I can’t
speak God’s life-events language, and the message is
something I just have to try to hold onto, the message
is something I can sort of live my way into or some¬
thing, the message is a poem in a foreign language
that I have to repeat with my own foreigner mouth,
but I still don’t understand what I’m saying, yet I find
the sounds to be beautiful, which I guess is my pay¬
ment in advance. The full payment is that I enter a

216

world that is so far unintelligible to my intellect, and
that seems promising)

So I have to remember that whole part about my gig¬
gling along hardly, just like my fellows in the theater,
my old drugs effervescing in my creaky brain, that old
lumbermill that hasn’t been completely retrofitted,
but which I’m trying to represent as being under new
management. But that’s how it is. I guess because I’m
writing this down, and at least S. is going to read it,
that now I’ve stored it in a way that I can come back
to -it)

My face is on fire. How did this happen? I was just
playing with matches and suddenly my face is on fire.
Well, now is not the time for thinking, now is the time
for frantically searching for a way to put it out. I
think I should stuff my face into my shirt. Okay, I did
that. I think the fire’s out now. Now, I think I will
dial that emergency number. The one over the phone.
Oh, it’s still 911. Good, they didn’t change that. Now
what? “Hello” “Hello sir, state your emergency.” “I lit
my face on fire.” “What’s your address?” “5955 Lark
Avenue.” “Five nine five five Lark Avenue?” “Correct.”
“Is your face still on fire?” “No.” “Is anything else on
fire?” “No, I don’t think so.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m
sure now, I’ve looked all over the room.” “Okay, so do
we need to send an ambulance?” “I think so, I don’t
think I can drive.” “Okay, we’ll send one right away.”
“Wait, that’s going to cost a lot of money, won’t it?”
“Sir, I think getting medical attention is worth it.”

217

“What if I just wait?” “Sir, I would advise taking a
ride in an ambulance. You don’t want to lose your
face. Time is of the essence.” “You know what, I think
I'll just wait until my roommate comes home. I'll call
him up and then he can come over on his lunch break
and run me over to the hospital.” “Are you sure, sir?”
“Yes, thank you ma’am.” “Okay. I want you to verify
that you declined an ambulance.” So I said my full
name and my identification number and she must
have recorded it on her computer)

I went to the hospital and sure enough, I had waited
too long, and I lost my face. And now I go around and
people look away from me, and then they learn how to
look at me. And I wish I could say that having lost
my face would make me unidentified, but actually, ev¬
eryone knows who I am: I’m the guy with no face. I
can’t really hold out hope for a future in which every¬
body else lights their face on fire and doesn’t get
prompt treatment. So here I am, damaged and promi¬
nent, when all I wanted to do was to play with
matches)

It is the warm-ish nighttime of a warm day, the crick¬
ets awake and the humans beginning to fall asleep,
here on the 26th of July, 20—.

218

I cleaned out the refrigerator today and found this old
memento of you, an old container of what we had that
last night, the night before you told me about the ma¬
jor change in your life. It was some ratatouille, and I
wondered if it was good to eat still, so I tried some,
and I’m not sure that it was. I think it was just a lit¬
tle bit alcoholic. And that’s about how I feel about
you, delicious feelings that have become at least a lit¬
tle bit alcoholic'.-

You were always there in my life, my daimon, the
voice in me which told me where to go and what to
say. I loved you, you were always so close to me. And
now that I have attained a certain age, I can see that
I have to go on without you, that I have to leave you
behind. I made this decision, but it was actually you
who made this decision, as you abandoned me. Never¬
theless, I can see that this was a good decision by me,
to make it so that you would know that you needed to
leave. Yet, I did not realize that I was making this de¬
cision, I thought I wanted to keep you around, and
what I was doing was directed toward keeping you
around:

We spent a lot of time together. It was like, every
book I read, you were reading over my shoulder, re¬
minding me of what we had read before, making con¬
nections, wondering about the outcome of the novel,
building castles out of the non-fiction material. Now,
with you gone, I realize who I always was: a slow per¬
son, a bored person, beating down books with a club,

219

while you used to just kind of talk them into sitting
still, you used to not even have to kill them. And we
spent time together with groups of my friends. You
were so charming, so fast and warm, you sparkler, and
now that you’re gone, I just stand, and wish I could
say anything, and stand stunned, like a deer in the
headlights. You knew all of my friends, and all of my
friends knew you}

Do you remember when I was in school and we used
to do homework together? It was amazing. Even when
I did math (which was not your favorite subject), I
would ask you for help, and something in you would
love me enough that you would engage with the mate¬
rial, and you would save my behind so many times,
that I even graduated from school. I can’t believe I’m
realizing this now for the first time, that only now I
am grateful for all you did for me}

I will give you a name, although I never thought too
much of who you were or what you were over the
years. With some beings, “who you are” and “what you
are” are the same thing, and so it is with you. Your
name is Youthful Intelligence, and it seems that you
have forsaken me, probably forever}

It is the later morning of a hungry day, the 27th of
July, 20—.

220

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” so the saying
goes, but I can remember a specific time in my life
when that was not the case}

It was my first year of junior high school. My brother
was still in elementary school and our mutual friend,
(my eventual sister-in-law) was going to a magnet
school five miles away, a special school for those who
studied the arts. I hadn’t met L. yet (or if I did, that
was before he transferred into the school system). Of
course I’d long before I rnctjS}

In short, I was surrounded by people who had their
own world, their own priorities, and I don’t exist, I am
a blank slate, I don’t even like talking about this, and
you know how much I like to talk}

One day, I saw someone I'll call X., and I saw him at¬
tacking a boy named Y. As far as I could tell, they
were both Greek gods inscribed on the ceilings of all
of our temples and caves. Therefore, I was full in my
rights to step in — anybody can attack a god. I
thought “Blessed are the peacemakers” and I saw, felt,
assumed, was programmed as, “There is a situation
that needs to be put to rights”, an order that needed
to be set right, an exertion of my feeling of being able
to act, my responsible power, and then I slipped into
the moment and grabbed X.’s hands and said “Stop
it!” And then the two of them looked at me like I was

221

an idiot, and I felt like an idiot, and they turned away
in disgust. I have never been made fun of more in my
life since and I never was before, that was my year of
being crushed. And it seemed that these two enemies
came together after my intervention, but perhaps they
had always been on the same side:

I can hear a low-frequency oscillator in the hum of the
refrigerator, and I am about to fall asleep on this lazy
afternoon of the 27th of July, 20—.

Can a possibility be an actuality? The more I think
about this, the more confused I get. I can see how a
possibility could become an actuality. A possibility
could actually exist in my mind. On the wall in that
house that smells too much like me, there’s a flat-
screen TV that can display just about any kind of im¬
age as long as it’s moving, moving toward a destina¬
tion, some sort of logic to the flow of it — even if it’s
trying to depict absurdity and noise. I am absolutely
glued to this TV, though I have paintings and busts
that could give me so much more peace and clarity. I
want the noise, sound, voices, the drawing along, the
calling-into of my television of possibility. How thick is
the image on that TV? In one sense, it’s as thin as a
fraction of an inch, the width of the layer of LCDs,
but as I look at it, it has the depth of whatever I see

222

in it, there’s a world in there that I can enter in my
imagination, but there is nothing to meet in there, but
I keep getting drawn along into this drawing-along.
What is the meaning of possibility? Someone could
make what is not, what is! I am confounded. But I
keep watching, and sometimes I feel compelled to
reach into my wall and grab it into what becomes a
kind of solar flare of my intention, I am drawn along
into speaking or touching or gesturing, I am drawn
and drawn along}

The possibility, insofar as it is a fraction of an inch
wide, a mere film, is a real, an actual, concrete reality,
but what is this possibility that is as deep as my
imagination? And by having spoken of my imagina¬
tion, how do I understand that? I am beset by these
perplexities}

I would be inclined to say “I do not know yet, and
there may be an explanation that I will learn or dis¬
cover, and by not knowing this, I may make a misstep,
a dissonance, but ultimately I will end in love, and
there will be good actualities for everyone.” This is
what consciousness says and something that I can’t
absorb with too much consciousness}

Yet, I am not ready to rest in this, I want to tire my
heart in the wrestling and the exhaust of myself, I
want to watch the TV and get into the show — what
happens in season 3? I want the possibility to remain
a possibility, lying in its depth before me, to relate to

223

this magical being which is beautiful and beyond'.-

The possibility is a being that includes multiple times.
What I mean is, the possibility starts with its en¬
trance on the TV screen, and then it will either break
in or break me out of the wall, or it won’t, and the
display of the TV show, and the breaking, are sepa¬
rated by an unknown amount of time, or the breaking
never happens and out there in her own house that
smells of her (although perhaps better-ventilated than
mine), there is the actuality of the possibility-

And do I love her? Do I love the possibility, or the
person? I only have the possibility with me. Yet I
know that there is or could be an actuality, that there
are real people, that what I say and do affects them,
just as they affect me)

There is a spirit of joy, freshness, a healthy, life-giving
expectancy, and as I love health almost as much as I
love love, I shall rule such an expectancy a good thing

— But to be thinking these thoughts, these distinc¬
tions and splittings of hairs, these delineations and
justifications, this attempt to identify the good in this
experience, it must have become entropic, humming
randomly, and something must have gone stale in me

— I know myself thus far — I must have strayed into
the great puddle of molasses in which I derive all my
sweetness — this hell -j-j-

Of course the answer to my question is “Move on i ;

224

But I refuse. I will never move on. I will simply hold
on until something changes. I will hold on and drown
until I can breathe}

As I watch my television, the shows begin fresh, be¬
come stale with repetition, then, though repeating ex¬
actly, in precise reruns, become sometimes indescrib¬
ably comforting, and other times indescribably funny,
all the while, through its emptiness, through the
transparency, the amazing transparency, which is be¬
yond that fraction of an inch and beyond the apparent
depth beyond that, the deeper reality that I am sit¬
ting on my couch, eating my snacks, resting my bones
after a night out with reality — or even, even in my
disability or my house arrest, sitting, breathing — I’m
alive — I continue through time, and right now, in the
privacy of my home, I am safe}

The meaning of you, or the multitudes around you, or
even of S., even if all reality or actuality is taken away
from me, except my house, is that I am alive and I
will continue through time}

Yet if I did not love safety, I would have a different
life. A coward wins the lottery a thousand times, a
brave man but once, and discretion is the better part
of valor, yet I cry out to God: “Who am I? Where am
I going? Who do you need me to be?” And ultimately,

225

this is my answer, to first ask the question}

I have asked the question before — but clearly I have
not finished with it. This unresolved question is a be¬
ing that is stretched over time — the possibility of an
answer, and yet a question, in all its hunger, is a fill¬
ing, is a filling of the gaze, and a filling of the sense of
purpose, it is the beginning of a path. God is gracious
enough to give us hunger, to us who are hungry for
becoming:

To love this question, which in our experience is never
answered — life is a question that in our experience is
never answered, which may in fact never be answered,
eternal life which will never settle into an answer, but
into an answering, a love for some person that never
resolves, a love for another person, a love for the en¬
tire community of persons, love is hunger, the only
thing to do is to hunger and thirst for

righteousness}

I will be filled — with hunger — and the hunger will
be — at peace, and the peace will settle on my eyes,
will clothe my heart. And somehow, I will become at
peace with all people, I will become what I am not —
what a mystery}

Perhaps I need the right kinds of hunger, and peace,
and imagination. That there is a good and bad of ev¬
erything, and it is simply that I need to keep living
life, to discover these new ways, these new vibes, these

226

new ways of pronouncing words and looking at
crowds, for these realities to break into me, and leave
me laboriously reconstructing them, looking at them
from a million different angles — and then what? I
don’t know — soon I will have nothing to say, but
having spoken my peace, I will look like a somewhat
different person the next time you see me’.-

I have a headache, I should have eaten more today,
there’s a speaker blasting in my ear and I want to go
home. It is the night of the 27th of July, 20—.

What’s going on in here? You all are dancing, there’s
this great big dance going on and I don’t know how to
dance, but I’m supposed to. So all of you are teaching
me and my body makes half the moves, but inside I
am watching a movie of all of you dancing, sitting on
the couch of my mind, observing your limbs in harmo¬
nious motion, and yet my body is moving. How
strange'.-

When I was a kid, I would get caught up in thought,
thinking about whatever: mushrooms, Pilgrims, the
nature of reality. And then I would realize, having
gone deep enough, that this is reality, that I am
named what I am named, and that I am living this
life and this is reality that I can move my hands in

227

this world in which we live, the world exists. This is
my proof that the world exists, I guess — an experi¬
ence that one might allege is entirely in my head'.-

I put on my cotton socks and my canvas shoes and I
went out for a walk in my neighborhood. I saw the
towering smokestacks and the little houses, which
were built in the days before zoning, I guess, right
next to the giant warehouses. I live in an apartment
building over on the edge of this incongruous district.
Everything in this neighborhood is saying something,
and in the three years I’ve lived here, it’s always been
on the tip of my tongue, yet I’ve never been able to
speak it in my mind:

I’ve looked at several angry persons in my time, and
sometimes I have had nothing bad happen to me, but
one time I regretted it. I looked at this angry man
once and he came up to me and I thought he was go¬
ing to clock me, rewire my personal time frame, but
instead he said, “I’ve had schizophrenia for over 20
years now and I find it very hurtful when people stare
at me. I feel like I’m not a real person. I feel like I’m a
monster and that I don’t belong. Please, please stop
staring at me.” And I too feel like a monster some¬
times, and like a strange ghost... how could I have
done this to my brother?

I’m still wondering how it is that I will hold to the
possibilities with the utmost loyalty and ardor, and
yet in a healthy way}

228

I got in a truck and drove the piles of things I didn’t
need anymore to the dump. These were things that I
could have sold if I had more time, perhaps, but I had
to hurry up and move. Sometimes, it’s time and you
have to go, you don’t know why but it’s time, you
have decided to migrate to a different organ in this
metaphorical host body that you and your ancestors
have infested'.-

The freedom of skiing, a whole afternoon of letting go
and letting gravity. The freedom of the moon, those
afternoons we spend jumping up and down on the
trampoline. The freedom of a good meal, the strange
way that the inner reality and the outer reality come
together as the glucose hits the brain.-

There were 99 bottles of root beer on the wall and
then you took one down and passed it around, and
now there are only 98 bottles of root beer on the wall.
How things change over time, how is it that every¬
thing gets used up, and here we are, never too con¬
cerned, as we inhabit this moment, and enjoy it as
though it will never end, yet with the utmost casual¬
ness}

It is the golden noontime on this 28th day of the sev¬
enth month, this month of July, sometime in the third
millennium of what is the common era of our Lord,
sometime in this first century of the third millennium.

229

Now, S., I will go on away from talking to you, to
wander in other places, by myself, or shall I wander in
the same places?

I’m rambling — I will be rambling. But I hope to
meet up with you, sooner, later, or in between, and in
a more substantial world than this}

If this volume seems unfinished to you, you know
what to do.

230

APPENDIX

My name is James. I live in San Diego, CA.

I'm creator or co-founder of some podcasts, including
Loving the Cloud (source/inspiration of much of the
material in this book), and The House of Mourning (a
podcast of mourning).

I have written a few other works that I presented be¬
fore the public eye, which may have been intended for
a person like you, but which may not have been —
who knows who could be reading this book right now!

Scripture quotations are from the World English
Bible, in the public domain.

231

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish I could put everyone’s name down, but I can¬
not. The following are a selection.

Of the people I do not know personally: Special
thanks to Carol A., Hideaki A., Bilinda B., Duncan
B., George B., Johann B., Jorge B., Martin B.,
Thomas E., Elizabeth F., Francois F., Garry F.,
Michel F., Debbie G., Joseph G., Robin G., Tim G.,
Martin H., Mary H., Abraham L., David L., Ramon
L., Lynne L., Friedrich N., Colm O., Sean O., Andy
R., Simon R., Kevin S., Klaus S., Laetitia S., Max S.,
Peter S., Malcolm X., and the Russian ikon painters,
and extra-especially the Evangelists.

Those whom I know and have known: Special thanks
to Riley H., Alex M., Ryan R., Kevin S., Richard Y.,
the B. family (from which I descend, in all their pa¬
tience and supportiveness), and extra-especially the
very real person behind the character S., although she
may not be who I think she is.

To those whom I have always known and will never
begin to know: Thanks for everything, for the gift of
not knowing and of always finding out, of being lost
and never at risk from wandering.

Without the influence and support of these people, I
would certainly have been unable to write this vol-

232

ume.

Further, I would like to thank the people who made
my shoes (special thanks to Bethlehem, founder of
SoleRebels, for leading a fair trade shoe company, and
especially to whichever workers made my shoes); those
who made my clothes, whether under fair trade condi¬
tions or not; my food, picked by people working hard,
farmed by people assuming financial risks I am not
willing to bear myself; my “technological” devices, for
all the exactitude and dexterity and tedium that those
require to make; the police and military of my city
and nation, who take on moral challenges that I don’t
have to, although they are sometimes abusive of their
trust; for the other people in power, insofar as they
have been a blessing and not a curse; the Christian
church, which has nurtured me although it goes
astray; and a special thanks to future generations,
who will pay for my environmental degradation, the
futureness and possibility of whom allows me to be
heedless enough to produce works such as this. (And
this list is inevitably and unfortunately incomplete.)

All of my readers benefit from these people, or people
like them. In some cases we feel as though, notably
with those institutions in power, that they can handle
this benefit-taking, that we deserve to take benefit
from them, even without a sense of gratitude.

Whether this is right or wrong, I do not say. Yet, in
other cases, there is obvious occasion to feel gratitude,
and to bear in mind the high cost of our lives, a cost

233

which other people bear for us. There is a misery and
a poverty that underlies our pleasures and our wealth
— I am speaking to anyone cultured and leisured
enough to have enjoyed — or written — this book. I
say this not so that you blame yourself or others, but
so that we deny ourselves, take up our crosses (live to¬
ward death), and follow Jesus.

234

INTERLUDE

Leaves of paper rescued from the fire:

-8. AUTHOR’S NOTE

God, as far as I am concerned, is a perfectly loving
and therefore perfectly trustworthy being, who has ex¬
isted before our physical universe and will exist after¬
ward. I take “God is love” (as something that I believe
in and try to rely on before fully understanding) but
not to mean exactly that God is what we tend to un¬
derstand love to be. God is a final harmony between
all peoples, along with the eternal God at the same
time, all brought into one will, one body; whereas in
the plane of becoming, God is becoming that commu¬
nion. In the harmony, all will trust and be trustwor¬
thy.

Notably, God underlies all of reality. All of reality
tends toward that final harmony aspect of God, and
all of it rightfully should, as it originally came from
that final harmony.

God is powerful, ultimately, inevitably so, but God’s
power is subordinate to his love (subordinate to him).
This is an essential feature of his trustworthiness.

[I think I’m still missing the mark: God is in perfect
harmony with himself, his power and his love are all
one. Yet I think I’m still missing the mark: I don’t

235

have words for God, but I can live my life.]

God is (at least) an apparent reality.

-7. PUBLIC REALITY

For instance, let us say that everything is matter and
energy. This matter sometimes is organized in the
form of a human being, and that human being some¬
how is, or has, individual consciousness. Everybody
shares the same reality, and any private perceptions
are marginalized, are considered less real than what¬
ever the public reality is. Public reality tends to as¬
sume that what is, is what is rationally communicable.

-6. SOLIPSISM

Basically, I am the only thing that exists. I have a
conscious self and a subconscious self. The subcon¬
scious self dreams at my conscious self all the time, all
these strange manifestations of its mysterious being. I
have these people that I love, hate, look down on, look
up to, whatever, all these beings are aspects of me
that I have or have not acknowledged in my heart. I
am apparently a far more rich being, as far as imagi¬
nation goes, and sheer profundity of vision, because
my invented world is apparently as big as that of the
whole public reality (under the public reality view), at
least as far as public reality can be experienced by any
one person.

Notably, in my solipsistic reality, people don't tend to

236

believe in solipsism, they regard it as a joke. What a
strange, dream-like joke.

-5. SEMI-SOLIPSISM

My dream world is a prism that diffracts the light
that enters it, and I can output intentions, thoughts,
words, vibes, emotions from my inner self out to other
people through my prism, distorting it on the way
out, only to be distorted on the way back into their
worlds. When I speak to another person, I am cer¬
tainly affecting their final person, but I may not liter¬
ally be speaking to them at that time. Each of our life
stories proceed perhaps in radically different ways.
Perhaps I am, as I perceive myself to be, writing in
the early 21st century A.D., but you, somehow, are an
oarsman on a Greek ship in the 4th century B.C., or
you do not even live on earth, or you live in the fu¬
ture. Perhaps we all have the end of the world hang¬
ing over our heads, perhaps each of us is the measure
of his or her own world and when we die, that is the
end of it, and we all reappear in some public reality
future, perhaps, in which we see each other as we re¬
ally are, having matured to our real form, finally to
see who it was we were trying to talk to, seeing how
everything and everyone was both a metaphor and
with basis in direct, literal reality.

237

-4. BASIC KNOWLEDGE

Everything begins with impersonality. Then, causality
plays out, and eventually we have human beings who
are somehow, at least apparently, personal. And then
those humans eventually, over the course of life, are
killed, turned into impersonality. There is no inten¬
tion, no love, nothing, except things happening, blind
power, power exercising. Things come from and go to
impersonality, or perhaps I could say, blind power. As
such, there is no authentic form of personality. What¬
ever human beings want to determine about them¬
selves and their future, they have to assert themselves.

Epistemology is (at least should be) circumscribed by
this view, by those who hold to this view. That is,
people do (or at least theoretically should) approach
knowing as a process of interrogating a reality that
does not reveal its secrets easily, adopt a methodologi¬
cal suspicion in all investigations. The interrogator
can’t rely on any apparent personality in what he or
she sees in reality. This must be an illusion, because
reality is fundamentally impersonal.

-3. FALSE MEMORY

Practically speaking, the false memory becomes for
many purposes a real memory, serving to shape how
the future self is composed. Perhaps all that we really
learn from these memories is what kind of person you

238

want to see yourself as, what kind of person you make
yourself into. But that is interesting and powerful in
itself, although that self-creation may pry your reality
away from that of your neighbor.

-2. INTELLIGIBILITY

My consciousness can apprehend, process, vibe with,
pick up the frequencies of, certain experiential reali¬
ties. These realities are “intelligible” to my conscious¬
ness. Yet, what if there are other frequencies, vibesets,
thoughtsets, which my mind can’t find intelligible? By
analogy, suppose there is a thought which is related to
another thought. (Easy to find examples.) Now sup¬
pose there’s a thought which is unrelated to all other
thoughts. (Very hard to find an example — in fact, by
formulating it, you related it to other thoughts, be¬
cause it shares words in common.) Yet, unthought
thoughts may perhaps be completely unrelated.
(There’s a lot of fun thinking there!)

Imagine that, unlike with the thoughts, you look up at
the moon one night, and the moon’s light gives you
access to something, in your consciousness, which was
meant for someone else’s consciousness, someone
who’s not even of this planet. You see by that light of
the moon a reality that part of you is ready to digest,
but the rest of you isn’t. We have this or a similar ex¬
perience sometimes when we are at a loss for words
(perhaps trying to explain Being and Time to some¬
one).

239

And so this basic knowledge breaking in is like some¬
thing from that disconnected universe somehow be¬
coming true without us being fully able to digest it
into intelligibility. Ultimately, there has to be a
speechlessness on our part or incommunicability about
the other reality breaking into our own. It’s true but
not intelligible, it’s pure consciousness touching our
pure consciousness, perhaps. Perhaps it’s being
touched on a side of our being that we have hard time
explaining, something primordial or fractal-like
(“Strange Loop”y) by something which itself
(himself?) is similarly strange; as opposed to being
contacted on a more everyday, presentable side, as
when the eyes (according to one popular story) per¬
ceive the photons bouncing off of some nearby object.

-1. SPACESHIP

Imagine you wake up, you first come to life, in a
spacecraft, with a pile of science fiction books by your
side. You see a giant viewport, showing the stars, you
see an instrument panel on a few of the walls. It’s all
in accordance with those science fiction books you
quickly learn to read. (These books range from the
most basic science fiction books to the most ad¬
vanced.) From all of this, you conclude that you are
floating in a void, with disabled engines, but yet, for¬
tunately, with what appears to be an inexhaustible life
support system. (You phrase things in terms of the

240

science fiction, and it all looks right, looks like it fits
what you’ve read.) And so you look over at the door
that says “Airlock”, and you never open it, reasoning
that unless and until you dock with another ship or
land on a planet with breathable air, there’s no point
in going out there.

And so your belief, your lens, your stories, determine
for you what you investigate. But if only you had in¬
vestigated, you would have found a space suit, which
is something that for some reason was never men¬
tioned in your science fiction books, and you would
have decided to go outside the ship on a space walk,
and the moment you opened the airlock would have
found yourself in a giant dome, in which there were
lots of people: it turns out that your spaceship was a
false reality, and opening the airlock amounted to you
consenting to take an herbal tea, at the hands of the
cognitive healers, to return to the reality of other peo¬
ple.

241

0. RESTLESSNESS

If your heart is alive, you yearn. If you yearn, you’re
restless. If you’re restless, you search for new truth. If
you seek, you find, and yet perhaps you still yearn and
repeat the process.

This will happen unless either your heart gets killed,
and so you have no more capacity to yearn, or your
heart enters a state where it is overflowing, always
thirsty and always being filled, from a source of over¬
flowing life.

It is likely that everyone will settle out into some sort
of closed-minded state. Either because we’ve been
given extreme life by what we believe in, or because
what we believed in murdered our hearts.

If you want to know the truth, your best bet is to
keep your heart alive as much as possible. There are
sources of heart-dulling. You can tell from their vibe.
Stay away from those things, and seek out the things
that give you more life, and the aspects of those
things which specifically give you that life.

242

What is the meaning of this?:

“If you remain in my word, then you are truly
my disciples. You will know the truth, and
the truth will make you free.”

They answered him, “We are Abraham’s off¬
spring, and have never been in bondage to
anyone. How do you say, ‘You will be made
free’?”

Jesus answered them, “Most certainly I tell
you, everyone who commits sin is the bondser¬
vant of sin. A bondservant doesn’t live in the
house forever. A son remains forever. If
therefore the Son makes you free, you will be
free indeed.”

Is it not that the truth will work in you until you stop
committing sins? And thus, falsehood will tend to
keep you committing sins.

243

1. RABIES

“The Christian needs to be an apologist, to promote
the seeking of truth. But the usual apologetic
methods, as evidenced by the Internet, need to be set
aside, this approach of not loving the atheists we seek
to convert. We try to attack ‘error’ head-on, as our
ancestors did each other in denominational debates,
but the only way to find the truth is through love,
and let me logically demonstrate.

“Rabies modifies the host to spread the virus, and so
it is with ideologies. Christianity, in its dead form, is a
virus, a stupid tendency that even replicates itself,
and it modifies us to foam at the mouth or perhaps be
dutifully kind. In its live form, it is something unlike a
virus, it is a living Word, mindful and implanted in
us, which strengthens, feeds, enlivens us so that we
express it without distortion. Rabies both adds
functionality (sort of) and destroys functionality in
the poor dog in order to further itself, and so it is
with ideologies. Consider this, if your heart is alive,
you yearn, and as you yearn you are restless, and as
you are restless, you search for new truth, and as you
search for new truth you can find it and accept it.

And if your heart is dead, you do not yearn, and you
are not restless, and you stay with your current truth.
And so over time we will tend toward some kind of
closed-mindedness, either because our hearts have
been killed, or because... we have found a source of life
that fills our yearning hearts continually. We will be

244

stuck believing whatever killed our hearts without
regard to truth, such is the effect of self-satisfaction
on the intellect, or we will be stuck believing whatever
gave us overflowing life.”

245

5. JUST CAN’T STAND

“I don’t know a formula for determining how much
Christians fight vivid, obvious destruction or oppres¬
sion other than that they remember that their battle
is ultimately against evil and not people, that they are
driven by trust in love and not trust in power, and
perhaps that sometimes there will be things they just
can’t stand.”

246

9. BEAUTY

“Beauty is a Satanic thing if it gets in the way of love,
and even the beauty of love (as we understand love)
could get in the way of love. The beauty of spending
time with people could be Satanic, every experience is
on the knife’s edge of being the horrible, twisted ver¬
sion of what it should be, and not for reasons that are
immediately apparent, or that those unpracticed in
seeking to love would be able to discern. The particu¬
lar destructiveness of beauty is its ability to erase
things, to anesthetize, yet of course on one level it is
the opposite of anesthetization. To make us say “ev¬
erything, just so, in its place”, beauty (for all that
artists try to shock) has bourgeois tendencies, exactly
in that it is art. To take a shocking thing and make it
more shocking through art is to make it more bour¬
geois, because all art is about beauty, at a certain
level. All art is at least “found art”, and is about
foundness, about the foundness of being able to de¬
clare something, whether an object or a process or an
aesthetic, under your decision and control. The most
aleatoric artists still exist in foundness, and every ap-
prehender of art, beyond perhaps the most naive, are
at risk of their own foundness, in resonance with the
artist’s. Art is power enfleshed or expressed in beauty,
and so is perhaps the most natural way for power to
enslave us — but of course, as it is potentially a tool
for evil it is even more so, potentially, a tool for heal-

247

ing and truth.

“At some level, the consumption of art, which occurs
when anyone “finds” art in things, whether intended to
be art or not, is a hugely stupid phenomenon, a giant
roaring wave. Why do we need to consume so much of
it? What are we getting out of it? I am asking this
not simply of the moment-by-moment content, you
could name 365 different things you get out of art in a
year. I’m talking about the overall mood, spirit, prac¬
tice, mode of being, the bathing in beauty, in the ob¬
ject held up as a representative of intentionality, to
our safe, at-home, catered-to gazes. We’re helpless be¬
fore all these beautiful things, before this invitation to
appraisal and pleasure. We don’t stop to think about
what the point of all this beauty is. Some will allege
that art need have no point. But then, art becomes an
absolute, a thing-for-its-own-sake, why not call it a
god? And what a stupid god it is. Art doesn’t care
about you. Art, as cousin-or-instance of power, will
betray you — whenever it does.”

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11. LIGHTLY

And I imagine my response, carrying around ' We
stand under God’s judgment.' as me saying “It’s
about a lot of different things, but mainly it’s about
how things need to change.” And I imagine that (hope
that, somehow, though I know that in the moment I
will say something entirely different), I imagine myself
saying “things need to change” the way S. would, with
a kind of lightness and balance to the statement, per¬
haps I would have to tilt my head to one side so that
statement would come out balanced.

People have subtle and interesting approaches to the
way that they think and express themselves. There’s
certainly something in S. that stands out, or stood
out, to me, as though she came from some other
place. (Maybe she did, after all.) I anticipate commu¬
nicating with people from my hometown, although
they don’t all necessarily come from San Diego, that’s
what this party is about, the hometown drawing in
the hometown, and so this person who is not part of
my hometown, this stranger, offers me a way to think
and express what is unfamiliar to my hometown. I
could have tried on my own, but my non-hometown-
ness is conditioned by my hometown. What that
means is that the ways in which I express my dissi-
dence from my hometown are exactly the ways that
don’t change the hometown, because if they did, then

249

the hometown would be different, from all its citizens’
clamorings. [Is this necessarily true?]

So hopefully I will have the presence of mind to apply
this lightness — this gracefulness, which bears an ap¬
propriate vibe for a party — this lightness and yet
firmness. It’s certainly not native to me, and I don’t
even know that I can practice it in my everyday life,
perhaps it is something only brought out at celebra¬
tory occasions amongst reunions of young friends, or
connections between people for the first time when
they are young.

250

CHAPTER 2

August 14th, 2015. San Diego, CA. At a cafe. On a
warm, dry day.

My friends,

(You are all my friends if you have read this far.) I
write to you all to attempt to communicate
something. I will communicate by saying specific
things, but what I really want to communicate is a
“beyond”, a path that I can’t put into words. If you
can follow in this path, we can be better friends.

I re-read the text that you have finished reading.
(Which spoke of “being in a rut” and went on to speak
of S. and other people and the end of things) and I
found it to be underwhelming. In and of itself, this is
not a bad thing. There are even some great works of
art that are underwhelming. For me, Citizen Kane ,
and Bach’s Musical Offering, initially present
themselves as underwhelming. (Not that I’ve
necessarily produced a great work of art.) There’s
something underwhelming about real human
conversation. There’s a number of podcasts of real
humans fairly spontaneously conversing. You can
listen to them and easily be unimpressed, given the
lack of structure and the ebb and flow of
interestingness.

There is something trustworthy about
underwhelmingness (you have trusted me thus far by

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reading, I hope I further earn your trust!). Vivid,
obvious artwork grabs your attention, almost forcibly
charms you. You are helplessly absorbed. But I don’t
want to inflict such slavery on anyone, even for a good
cause. I want to bring forth a trustworthy spirit, or
vibe, more so than make any particular point. [And
yet I look back on all I have written and I don’t know
that I’ve done that.]

I tend to be oriented around the inner life. I see
the power of spirits and vibes, and ultimately I think
that trust of the outside world proceeds from a
trustworthy inner life, which can discern between the
trustworthy and the untrustworthy spirits. The inner
spirit or vibe resonates from the outer reality (and the
reverse can occur as well) and in this way you can
taste the spirits of the world, and know where there
are the beneficial and the detrimental.

A trustworthy spirit tends to be sustainable. Some
spirits have a cost that can’t be maintained over time.
Eventually you have to divert your life-path away
from them, because ultimately, you can’t bear most
costs forever. Even a small cost can eventually become
unbearable, when you’ve simply had enough of that
burdensome experience.

I wrote of S. earlier. You might be wondering
about her. Or, maybe S. is reading this right now. I
think she would know it was her. As far as S. is
concerned, I am open to all the possibilities expressed
in Chapter 1, plus additionally the possibility of not
at all being in contact with her, the perpetuation of

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the state I am currently in as I write this.

It has taken all this time to arrive at this peaceful
readiness. I had to write about her, and then to write
a “Chapter 2” which did not make it into print,
(something from which I will draw things to say,) in
order to organize my thoughts and intentions with
regard to her, and to put those intentions in
perspective with all that is important and not-her. I
know that there may be something disproportionate
and “re-developed” about my interest in her, about my
thought-life (“re-developed” in the sense that “she” has
become somehow a symbol in me, a presence that
goes beyond the woman herself — Oh my, if you’re
reading this, S., do not be afraid to contact me if you
were thinking of doing so before! Don’t let this
confession frighten you away! I will always possess the
symbol “S.”, but you have a real name which will
name the real you.) This overly-solid thought-life is
just the way I am, though, so I will live here, and
affirm this life with a minimum of shame, although
also with an eye to mitigating its defects.

We live in an interesting world. There is much that
is wrong with it, which causes intense suffering to
many people. And yet there is a certain amount of
wealth, whether material or otherwise, which people
possess. This extra, or abundance, could be shared
with the suffering people. But the people with the
wealth don’t share it. Some of them are hardened
people, or obviously bad people — “enemies” of the
poor. But many of them don’t derive any pleasure

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from depriving other people and are even saddened by
reports of suffering — and yet they do not share. I
think you, my friends, may likely be in this second
group. Please, be open to a new spirit and a new way
of thinking and acting. I want you to consider how
you can become a new person, on behalf of the world.

Suffering is a funny thing. There is suffering that is
necessary for personal growth. If you’re set on a bad
path, it can often be the case that to be turned to a
good path involves being “slapped in the face” by some
life event, which has to be painful to wake you up.
Suffering can also bring strength. It’s good to learn to
endure suffering, because then you’re not afraid to
suffer, which opens your horizons. This could be a
necessary thing.

Suffering also can be an occasion for flourishing,
for unnecessary benefit. By suffering, you could learn
a strength and a defiance that allow you to become
unnecessarily more, to ascend to a higher level of
responsibility. It may take the right mindset for you to
determine to grow from suffering, but if you have
that, you can make it into a gift.

Suffering has an essential role in teaching you to
love. Those who suffer can develop a sense of kinship
with other sufferers, and also a determined enmity
with evil, which can be an expression of love toward
evil’s victims. Suffering can teach a kind of humility,
which can be good or not, but the good kind is useful
in loving people.

Yet there is suffering that brings so little benefit
relative to its cost, that even if we have learned “the

254

worth of pain”, we are compelled by compassion to
help those suffering from it. Compassion may
immediately want to end pain, but in many cases, it
may be better to help people bear up under their
pain. Compassion is not just fixing problems, but also
about standing beside sufferers, affirming their worth
although, or because, they are desperate.

For about a year, I wrestled with a sense of my
own fakeness. I was callous, flat, feeling a constant
petty well-being. But I had been taught by a
breaking-in of deep suffering that in the depths of
suffering, even in the desperation, there was reality. I
wanted, after that, to find a positive mood, vibe,
spirit, existential reality, in which there was this
reality which I learned in desperate darkness.

From this, I have come to see that there is no
shame in desperation, that desperate people are
beautiful people experiencing a holy situation — real
life is being lived there. (Yet, they are also crazed
people in a terrible, even evil, situation.)

Fundamentally we are all desperate, needy people.
This is an identity I try to hold onto, especially try to
remember when I come across people in their
emotional nakedness.

And so I ask you to learn how to love desperate
people, as full people, not just as people to fix, but as
“ones like yourself”.

We are all family. This is a trustworthy
categorization of other people. When your brother
commits a crime, you may agree that he should go to
prison — justice must still be granted to his victims

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— but there are certain hard words you would not say
of him, because he is your brother. His crime and his
punishment would both dismay you. And if his
victims are family (to you), then you mourn their loss
as well.

There’s a difference between feeling sadness (in
general) and mourning (in particular). Sadness breaks
in on you and in some ways disables you. This can
easily be the case with grief. Yet it is possible to
grieve intentionally, to “put on a nice black shirt” and
respectfully go to a funeral. Sadness you may or may
not affirm, but mourning, you inherently affirm by
your choosing of it.

It is trustworthy to mourn in such a way that you
help other people. Mourning quiets you and teaches
you respect. Compassion urges you, and your “fix
people” side will forcefully enter the lives of suffering
people to “fix them”, but without respect for them.

The humiliation of being fixed without respect is a
problem that itself has to be fixed (or rather, healed)
but until you learn respect (through mourning or
otherwise), you will not be the one capable of such
healing.

In the short run, people who have chosen to be
children, or have never been raised out from being
children, or who have even been encouraged to remain
children, may be content to be fixed without real
respect. But as adulthood awakens (which is the
condition for the full beneficial powers of people), the
full shame of childhood prolonged, of a lack of
encouraging maturity, lack of seeing and expecting

256

maturity, can easily present itself as a debt deferred.

It either falls due in the form of broken relationships
between “fixing” “adults” and those they expect to be
“children”, or if not that, then in the help that those
overgrown children withheld from their own circle of
desperate associates by their immaturity. I ask of you,
my friends, to be on the side of maturity, and in
compassion and mourning, to expect more of others
— and yourselves.

The humiliated person, the desperate person, can
be humiliated into desperation, and looks at the
humiliating person (ever so “normal”, “reasonable”,
“mature”) and sees the self-satisfaction there. Self-
satisfaction is the least trustworthy spirit — although
in the midst of it, it is compellingly “normal”,
“reasonable”, “mature”; it is an obvious and vivid
depiction to yourself of why you should trust yourself,
it’s difficult not to trust it; but in truth it is the
worst, because it shuts down your growth as a person.
You can’t find a better path when you are self-
satisfied, and while being on the right path is possible,
the right path is not the one which deafens you and
flattens you toward other people and even all of life,
as self-satisfaction inexorably does to you as it infects
you. A trustworthy saying for you, friends: “Do not
rest until your heart overflows and yearns, and yet
overflows with life, and not until everyone may trust
and is trustworthy and has this underlying life.” This,

I hope, is my path, and yet my path is beyond that
saying, because I do not rest. A directed restlessness is
trustworthy, at least until the end of evil.

257

Unnecessary, unbeneficial suffering is evil, but so is
self-satisfaction. One destroys a person through being
dulled by pain, but the other destroys a person by
being dulled by lack of pain. Self-satisfaction is the
graver danger because of its extreme seductiveness. I
don’t expect suffering evil to claim too many souls, in
the long run, because people tend to have to be aware
that suffering is not sustainable, so they tend to want
freedom from it and its soul-deadening ways, but self-
satisfaction can successfully he to people that they’ve
“found it”, when really they’re following something
cheap and dead, into cheapness and deadness.

One of the tricks to watch out for is when you
become more “mature” (or really more mature) and in
your sense of maturity you become self-satisfied. You
will have to return again and again to your
commitment to abundant, trustworthy life for yourself
and all others — this final state and its pursuit being
in large part my understanding of what love is. So,
“Judge by love.”

You will have to develop the ability to contradict
your obvious, vivid reality, which is the “flesh” of your
reality, the loud, solid, compelling aspect of your
experience. When you are self-satisfied, all of this is in
bondage to the false sense of well-being. You gain
your freedom through the bare, hard whisper of your
spirit, a humble, holy spirit, as it is the spirit for, of,
love. You have to whisper the truth and live
unnaturally, in order to contradict your flesh. In that
way you can hunger and thirst for righteousness, even
when your very capacities for normal spiritual hunger

258

and thirst are being filled with empty food and drink,
or perhaps are being lied to, have your true
underlying need masked by some appetite-suppressing
drug.

(A second letter in the same envelope.)

It is necessary for me to tell you something so that
you can understand me. Perhaps this is something
painful for you to hear. It is certainly negative. It
could grieve you. This negativity is part of the path
I'm trying to convey, so I must proceed. And I want
to make it clear that there is always hope for anyone
who reads this book, that the word I am about to
speak need not define us forever.

This is what I have to say: We are murderers. Our
murders were easily executed, all-too-easily. We placed
what was extra in our lives, merely nice, above the
necessities of living — other peoples’ necessities. We
knew that there were people dying because of their
poverty, but we did not investigate what it was that
we could do. We even investigated to some extent —
yet somehow it ends up that we do not share. We
allowed the excuses of our culture, our friends, to
quiet our sense of responsibility. Instead of taking
action to change the discourse of our culture, so that
the most compelling topic of general conversation
would have been “How can we love?” we instead talked
about all kinds of other things. Most likely, because
we didn’t want to have to see ourselves or our friends
as murderers. We hid that judgment from ourselves,
but because we did so, the situation of torment has

259

continued, and the moral debt continues to increase,
but we have believed that we can forever put off the
day that it falls due.

We, brothers and sisters of those we murder, have too
much blood on our hands to ever make atonement.

We will have to rely on forgiveness, the forgiveness of
other people. (And as much as we want to be forgiven,
we must forgive.)

There is one circumstance in which it is impossible
to forgive: if the other person remains a friend of their
own transgressions. We turn our hearts before we turn
our whole lives, but the heart must repent, and in the
end, for the final harmony of love, all must repent of
all sins, this is the source of all trustworthiness. This
is our task, to turn against sin and turn toward love,
in our hearts.

Our hearts are revealed in our actions and
attitudes. And of course none of us individually has
the strength to cure the whole world. Further, we
make mistakes, have bad judgment and this is not sin,
yet it limits our effectiveness. Yet it is possible for
each of us to hold up our lives to the light of other
people in need, and see uses of time or money that we
would not engage in if love was our priority.

We have a long way to go to become decent people.
We have thought so small for so long. But the whole
time, we could have loved “so that”: Loving the self so
that we can love the neighbor, loving the neighbor so
that the neighbor can love the neighbor, and so on to
love the hometown; and the hometown so that it loves
the other hometowns and thus so that the whole

260

world is loved.

Love will give us the time to become repentant,
ready to enter the final harmony, but love may set
deadlines so that we feel the urgency to love, to feel
the sentence, deep in our guts and informing all other
thoughts from the backs of our heads: 'It needs to
change'; where 'It' differentiates into 'You', 'I', and
'The world as a totality.' In the end, the repentances
of all three imply each other, unless some person
severs themselves from love (that is, in this case, the
final harmony) through the ultimate self-satisfaction.

If you take this to heart (“We are all murderers”),
you will likely feel a burning which will differentiate
into anger and shame at yourself and other people.
Remember, this is all a family affair. Every murderer
and every victim is your brother, your sister. Shame
goes away when we do well — so do well, and
collectively do well with the others for whom you feel
shame. (Otherwise sin crouches at your door — there
are dark places that shame takes us.) Anger goes away
when we tire of it, when we can’t hold the burden any
longer. Anger at self and at others corrodes us, it is
unsustainable, yet it is our emotional contact with
negative reality. Anger tells its truth, and we must
learn from it to profit from it, and then let it go for a
more sustainable emotion, such as mourning.

What does anger teach, that mourning does not?
Listen to your own anger, do not be limited by my
finding. But my anger teaches me urgency,

“electricity”, even authority. It teaches me ' It needs to
change.' Perhaps my mourning can pick up these

261

traits. Or perhaps something else empowers change,
even a kind of joy. (Such is not inconceivable, in such
company as 'It needs to change.')

I am not naturally prone to either anger or
sadness. These do not usually, naturally, overtake me.

I can deliberately lean into sadness, to produce the
trustworthy mourning, but I do not know the key
(maybe one of you does) to lean into anger
deliberately, and so produce a trustworthy spirit of
anger, a sustainable spirit. I am learning a bit more
natural sadness, as I get older, but I do not think I
will be overtaken by it. There are some who are born
joyful and strain against joy to learn sadness (such as
myself, born with a sometimes cheap and hard, flat
and cruel, inexorable joy or “joy”) and some who
strain against sadness to learn deliberate joy, and
some who are naturally blessed with joy and sorrow
who must learn the blessing of deliberateness some
other way.

Deliberate joy is something we learn from trials.

We consider them pure joy, in a sense humbly and in
a sense defiantly. This is one way in which suffering is
a good thing, when we use it to teach us this quiet
strength.

Deliberate sorrow we learn by looking at the facts
that should move us to natural compassion, but which
don’t yet, and mourn the situation and go to work, to
strain and work at acting and seeing a compassion we
don’t feel. And it is very important that in this we are
clothed in respect, the spirit that goes along with the
attitude ' You' (that is, the person we are taking

262

compassion on) 'are a real person.' someone holy and
worthy in their desperation, someone to whom we are,
at our absolute best, equals; direct spiritual kin,
perhaps, through our own identity as desperate
people.

I have never had much success maintaining a
strong assumption of ' It needs to change' by myself. I
don’t have a strong drive to change the world, I am
not much of an angry person. I have wished to have a
social reality of ' It needs to change' around me, and,
importantly, one that seeks a trustworthy change in a
trustworthy way. Some of you, my friends, may join
with me face to face, I hope, and some of you will
profit by my example, I hope, in your own social
contexts, creating social environments — one-on-one
or group relationships — that have as a common
assumption, 'It needs to change.'

We seek to exercise power in order to fix or to heal.
This is part of ' change'. This is a dangerous thing to
do, yet it must be done. We need to become
trustworthy people in order to employ this power. Our
love must be the master of our power, rather than our
power the master of our compassionate action.
Trustworthiness of power is its authority.

Power is a stupid master. It is mindless and
pointless. It does not love its slaves. (Love must be a
person, must love his sons and daughters.) We get
addicted to power. It is subtle and seductive. Some of
us lust after it, and at least half-understand what
we’re caught up in. Some of us seek to have no
addictions at all, to master even power — but they

263

are addicted to ' I master', which is simply a
manifestation of power. Most subtly, perhaps, are
those of us who empty ourselves in the face of some
compelling destiny, some way-for-things-to-be that is
unquestionedly fitting, purely logical. These are people
possessed by causality and by the beauty of a “logical”
flow of cause and effect (the beauty of fixing things)

— these people are also the slaves of power.

Power is not trustworthy unless it is fully subdued
by love. (How is it that love subdues power? Is it not
then a power? Perhaps it is in its origin — I know
not. But in my life, at one level, I am a power who
chooses to subdue myself to love, and so, it is love
who subdues me. Trustworthy power gives itself over
to love.) Learn to taste, my beloved friends, the taste
of power-for-its-own-sake, the particular excitement
and compellingness of it, its disturbing electricity —
present in faint amounts in faint quantities — and its
tendency to snowball and accumulate, like moisture
feeding a hurricane, which makes small quantities of it
tend, when successful, to create large storms of it, as
sentient as a hurricane, as empty in the middle. If you
learn its taste, then also learn the taste of love, so
that you can discern the spirits that lead to life from
those that lead to turbulent dissipation (the final end
of a hurricane: the storm has turned into nothing, yet
leaves damage, far beyond the value of the rain it left,
which was its pretext).

Power is the great seduction that deceives people,
who end up becoming self-satisfied through its
promise of immortality. No one that I know

264

consciously believes he or she will live forever, never
tasting death, yet when we are feeling powerful, deep
down and all the way up into our voices and faces, we
embody 'I will never die.' We all have some capacity
for power which will run away from us if it just
manages to grow to the point of snowballing (through
“success”), and so deceive us into self-satisfaction. And
so we have to discipline our power with love, and one
way to do this is to devote our power to love by
working it hard in love’s service. [Notably, when you
work in love’s service, there is a particular way in
which you work, which has the spirit of love in it, the
heart that really loves. You can attempt to work
toward love’s goals without this spirit and heart, and
then in fact you are not working toward love’s goals,
and you are not working in the service of love. Love
does not employ you; you are not love’s servant.]

And so one way to overcome your sins is to be too
busy doing the right thing [in the right spirit] to have
time to do the wrong thing. And there is a spiral, a
snowballing, that brings life, as love is rewarded by
finding people to love, as love is loved in return and
even as love is perfected by the suffering and lonely
dryness of when it is unrequited.

I know that there is shame attached to unrequited
love in our culture, but love has long been unrequited
by us and acquires superabundant reality (if that were
possible) by love’s desperation. There is a danger and
a cost to unrequited love, a frightening side to it, yet
in all forms it can be a spiritual discipline, as it is a
deep trial. I know that some of my past feelings for S.

265

could embarrass me, in hindsight, and they have, out
of some sense of their disconnectedness from the real
moment. But they express a vision of the kind of love
I am capable of, which outstrips the reality that I’m
living in, my actual situation. Some day, whether
romantically or not, S. or not, I will love someone as
I’ve loved S.-the-symbol, the love that I’ve projected
out of my heart on the wall next to the projected
image of her.

Somehow we have to love what is not or not yet, with
love that isn’t even necessarily love yet, in order to
grow into truly amazing lovers. We have to stretch out
into something unnatural, difficult, dangerous, costly,
unusual: non-default; in order to grow.

Perhaps one way in which we need to stretch is in
our ability to identify with other people. It can be
entirely impossible to understand someone else when
you haven’t experienced what other people have — or
even if you have. You will want to tell people to grow,
as part of ' It needs to change', even as an act of
kindness, to those caught in suffering from which they
could learn. But if you do not really identify with
them, they may know that you don’t identify with
them, and be humiliated or resistant from your sense
of ease and mastery, of a problem that isn’t even
yours. This may not always be possible, but if you
can, suffer and grow alongside them — there is value
in casting your lot with another person, so that two
people are working on growing through the same
issues. There is value in solidarity, in suffering with
and alongside someone else. There is value as well,

266

perhaps more essentially than going through the same
struggle, in being in the spirit of one who struggles
and learns from trials, who is clearly and openly a
struggling person.

I hope I have not written overlong to you. Please
reply at your leisure.

—Sincerely,

Yours truly.

August 15th, a hot, dry day
Dear friends,

I hope you have slept well. I was loaded with
dreams last night, too many to remember.

I would like to speak of something else, say a word
about you (and me) that may offend you, or perhaps
free you.

This is who we are: sheep. We are distracted, easily
drawn along, easily led astray. Those of us who pride
ourselves for not being sheep are still sheep, drawn
along by more subtle and often more destructive
voices. We are by nature led by all sorts of things,
terribly distractible.

Some of us are also shepherds. We are good
shepherds or bad shepherds. The good shepherds
know their sheep, and lay down their lives for their
sheep. The bad shepherds are thieves who kill, steal,
and destroy. The good shepherds protect their flocks,
but the bad shepherds do not. The bad shepherds are

267

sometimes simply hired hands who stand by when the
wolves come.

There was once a good shepherd who is yet the
voice of love. It is through him that we become good
shepherds. It is through living his life that we enter
into him. He was free from sinfulness, and that too is
our destination, as good shepherds.

How strange to want to be a good shepherd and
yet to remain a most distractible sheep! And yet how
ordinary and common. Our hearts careen from one
thing to the next, one toy to the other, and we have a
high enough regard for love to try to listen to his
voice, but we’re not quite ever in the mood to absorb
what he says. We’re excited by the grass at our feet,
or even the grass over there, 10 feet away or on the
other side of the valley.

Sometimes it takes some persistence and
determination to enter into a state of hearing love’s
voice. It is my goal to find love to be the place in
which I live my life, this love with his guidance toward
the final harmony. I want to walk with love, to be a
friend of love, attending to love’s words.

You can learn the voice of love better, that is, can
hear it in the marketplace, by watching where it leads.
The voices that are not love will lead you away from
trust, trustworthiness, and the final trusting harmony.
They will lead you away from love. Everything
furthers something, some final image. Perhaps it is a
final image of power, or emptiness; nothing, or death.

We find ourselves sucked into these distracting
paths, these exciting, compelling ways, which

268

ultimately are lies, but which in the moment, to our
vividness and obviousness (our flesh) are solid,
substantial, real or even deeply real. These paths do
not honor a loving love, but honor instead the
mindless, heartless things, those tendencies which do
whatever they do, but which will never love their
servants and followers.

How odd it is that anyone would get out of bed
and try to build anything, outside of love! And yet we
all did this, before we realized the emptiness of
progress, accomplishment, and civilization for their
own sakes. Let us fall in love with, be married to, be
committed to, bow to, walk with and find ourselves
with love, starting now, and renewing our
commitment at every opportunity.

Love is a teacher — let yourself be taught, but love
is a lover too, let yourself be loved. Love is a friend,
let yourself be in the presence of love, walking the
same path, which is the path of love — love is a path.
But love is also a father, and you are becoming a full-
grown son or daughter, becoming secure in yourselves
as bearers of the family heritage of love. Let us be
taught, but let us walk close with love, without
distraction, starting now.

I forgot to mention yesterday an important point. I
remember it as though you had brought it to my
attention. I wrote earlier that love of self should lead
to love of your neighbor, and that should lead your
neighbor to love his or her neighbor, and this brings
about the love of the hometown, and then hometowns

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can in that way love each other and thus the whole
world. You might ask, “How is this so? How does it
work?”

If I love myself (or someone loves me) so that one
of my burdens is untied, I will be lighter and freer,
and then I will have the attention and health to see
someone else with a burden, and help untie it. Our
culture is full of divorce, breakups, and abusive
relationships. Freed from those and the burden of
restless mental wounds (and freed “so that”), we then
go on to desire health for our community, for the
people in our community, for other communities and
their people, and so, the whole world. This is all
possible if we are traveling on the path of love.

Don’t give up on the people in your life, unless
there’s some kind of abusive pattern that threatens
your (or their) spiritual (or physical) health. If you
want to do great things for love, you will do them for
people near and far, for people you already know,
people you will know, and people you will never know
individually.

I’ll speak a good word for you parents. You bring
forth life, an act of love (although like every costly,
constructive act, it is odd that we do it if not to
further love in the end. Somehow we will do it,
furthering civilization, state, or sheer population).
Parents are typically not throwing away their hours
on illusions (although that is still a possibility). For
parents, it is essential, not to give more time, which is
often impossible, but to communicate the right

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message. Young people, invest in yourselves, because
you are what you will communicate to your future
children. It is essential that the love of parents for
children be a love “so that” and not an end in itself.
Parents need to make their homes and relationships a
place for trustworthy spirits to be present, and to
invest in their children. In the past, parents would
invest so that their children could be materially more
prosperous, and have more of a voice in society, than
their parents, but now we need to invest so that our
children become spiritually mature at a younger age
than their parents, to prepare them for the decades to
come.

Children are naturally sheep-like and parents are
naturally shepherds. Parents love their children
though they are sheep-like, they also love them
because they are sheep-like, and this latter love (or
“love”?) is dangerous, may not be trustworthy. There
is no value in making your children “shepherd-like” so
that they become bad shepherds, or that they lose
their sheep-likeness to some lifeless, mindless idol, but
the younger that your children turn away from
distraction and into a walk with love, the stronger
they will be spiritually to resist lies and endure
suffering, and the healthier will be those they spend
time with, and the healthier will be our whole
community, and our children’s children after them.
You can teach them what you teach yourself, what
sheep and good shepherds need to learn.

Because parents are naturally shepherds, there is
the danger of them becoming bad shepherds. Parents,

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I encourage you to seek the path of the original good
shepherd, because the alternative is neglectful and
even destructive.

And one last thing that I almost remember you
asking. “You said that we were murderers for not
sharing with desperate people. But we did investigate!
And we found that it was simply futile to help them.
Are we really murderers?” I don’t know your heart.
That is what is important. Love knows your heart —
ask love what love’s judgment is. You will be happier
to be judged by love now rather than later, if you are
led to repent sooner. To repent, acknowledge your
ability all along to keep trying. To have said, “Yes, this
and that and the other were daunting, but given all
that, I still asked myself, what can I give? What can I
do, even if I am limited? Even if all my efforts would
have only amounted to having started to begin to
address the problems at hand.” — To have even
attempted to the impossible, which is what a person
might do when stricken with cancer and they seek a
new reality, the new reality of a second opinion.

(From that analogy of cancer, I don’t mean that
your life isn’t worth preserving. It is worth preserving
“so that”.)

The sheep can recognize how he or she has been
led astray in the past, has somehow loved to be led
astray, and in simple need call out to the shepherd to
guide him or her rightly, and if this encompasses the
whole heart, it amounts to a complete repentance.

You can approach love as though love needs to prove

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your crimes, or you can approach love as though you
want to follow love’s voice, and the nature of love’s
dealings with you will depend on how you desire to
deal with love. And so repentance can feel different to
different people.

Sincerely,

Yours truly.

August 16th, staying out of the heat

O, to live close by the shepherd’s voice! To learn a
new way to be a sheep.

Dear friends,

Find it to be pure closeness with love’s voice when
you face temptations of many kinds, for by beginning
to be pulled away, you pull back closer, you return to
your eternal lover, which could only be love, the very
love. That is, you may return — you always may, as
long as you remain open to hearing love’s voice.

Love knows that you are a sheep, and love has a
message for you as you are and ever will be a sheep.
Yet love desires that you love fully, and for many or
even most of you who read this, a word for you: take
hold of becoming shepherds. This sad world is full of
love’s children being deceived, getting caught in
spiritual traps, oppressed by bad shepherds, oppressed
by the dark storms, pressing down, choking down. We
are inherently going to be led, but the good shepherd

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can lead his or her fellow sheep into healing, into
“straight paths” and healthy pastures.

The key for a shepherd is to simultaneously step
ahead for the sake of love, to go ahead of others for
their sakes; and to go back as a sheep and remain
always with the good shepherd. In fact, better to stick
close to the good shepherd and be led by him into the
strange future pastures. To be a wandering sheep is its
own preparation for shepherdhood, but true
shepherdhood begins with a man or woman who stays
close to the voice of love, who by listening to the voice
of love, opens the ears of his or her neighbors to that
voice. We communicate who we are, our leadership is
us, if we listen to love, we lead others into listening to
love.

As we practice being shepherds, we practice the
embodying of love. Love is a person, an eternal
person, who is developing a temporal body, which will
last forever in the final harmony. As we stay close to
the good shepherd, we are guided into learning his
ways, to love what he loves, to will what love wills.
When we are perfected in love, we are fully the body
of love, and love does what we will; every fellow lover,
by loving, does our will; we do what every other lover
wills; we are as powerful as love, because we are as
ruled-over by love as possible, so joyfully bound
together with love in our wills.

As shepherds, we teach this will, this way, this path,
we embody and communicate it to the dearly-beloved
sheep, those whom we are given to. We heal the body
of love, even increase the body of love. Love is

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reproductive, a great flourishing.

There will always be relationships of leading and
being led, there will always be people who are more
powerful than others. The distribution of talents is
not fair (nor is the distribution of torments; some
talents are also torments). It will never be possible to
make everything fair. And so the powerful and
influential must become completely holy, completely
set apart into love. If you are talented, grab tight to
your talent, though it make your hands bleed, and
hold even tighter to love, in loving fear and joy.

Because justice will never be perfect, we will need
to learn to forgive, so that there may be restorative
injustice to help heal and cover over evil injustice. Let
the good be taken hold of, out of the bad. We will
also have reason to be envious, and to experience the
humiliation of powerlessness. What shall the shepherd
or incipient shepherd do in the face of envy and the
potential to humiliate others? In my experience, I am
not humiliated by, nor envious of, people who truly
love me, who connect with me in my desperation in a
way that affirms my worth. The good shepherd learns
to set aside the “objective” truth of judgments such as
“she’s the weaker vessel” to judge by love, to see the
whole picture — even if she is weak (if you are really
justified in that “objective” perception) what do you
regard about her? Do you see that weakness, or do
you see her, in herself, in your quiet-hearted
compassion and in honor? Mercy is better than
justice; gaze with humble mercy in order to see
beyond appearances. In this way you can judge by

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love, although this does not define the only way to
judge by love. When you judge by love, you make
logical and strictly just judgments, without partiality,
considering the evidence which love presents to you,
according to love’s spirit and priorities.

Love breaks in on you like fire, like continuing
lightning. Love teaches you about yourself, is a mirror
before you, faithful to show your faults — but only
when you are ready to take hold of love, to grip the
rope leading you, the steering wheel which steers you,
to become right in love’s eyes.

Love rests on you and speaks of your stored-up
riches, your celebrations in the last days, which
deprive the poor. As you look at yourself, you beg for
relief, and love’s relief is to teach you to love, to offer
you a heroic task to make love real in your life, so
that you can really be a believer in love, you can
really be a human being. You become who you should
be through the humility of casting yourself before
love, and the humility of hard work.

Love will appear to you in love’s true judgment
when you are really ready to begin, though it seem
impossible, that is, when you are ready to begin to
begin. For those of us with talents to share, our
talents will have to be re-beaten, re-forged, through
force and heat, to shape us into strong new tools, to
express our solid talents in love’s way. Do not shrink
back from the blacksmith’s hammer and fire. This is a
trustworthy process, as it shapes you into love’s
instrument — that is, love’s adult child, son or

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daughter set about the father’s business, yourself a
trustworthy agent.

Love deserves your love, and is deeply grieved by
your unfaithfulness. The sheep is unfaithful in his or
her innocence, but some take it on themselves to be
bad shepherds, whether shepherds of themselves or
others. Love will even be angry — temporarily — but
the conclusion of love’s anger, ultimately, is our
complete holiness, the purity of our close attention to
him, as sheep, even the purity of our good
shepherdhood; or it is our complete destruction. There
are some who will not be part of the final harmony,
because they prefer not to be. Love destroys what is
evil and which refuses the path of love. This path is
walkable by all who will simply begin to begin, open
to all sheep, to all children.

There is great mercy in the eyes of love, for love
judges by love, as he necessarily would. But there is a
moment, a movement, of love, of NOW, of lightning
and sustained current, and this NOW is for our
purification.

We forget love’s tender care when we “were”
immature, how he bound up our wounds when we
cried to him in repentance and desperation (though
we grieved him still with the immaturity yet to be
revealed — or immaturity even apparent in our
consciousness, even as we appealed to him). How he
clothed us and restored us from our shame, how he
worked in the hearts of our friends and family to bring
about their forgiveness or even forgetfulness of our
shame — we forget all this and continue to forget it as

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he does it for us time and again. We forget how he
made us his, clothed us with beauty — and we stray,
as sheep who should have become shepherds, who
should have come close to love’s voice in the pasture,
should have always been feeding at the feet of our
good shepherd. We are so foolishly ungrateful, so
callous to his love, so heedless and even cruel, that we
even sacrificed what was precious in us to flatly bad
shepherds and obviously wooden images of good — to
power, whether as a false image of love, or simply,
nakedly, shamefully itself. How strange, that we
should prefer these voices which only lead to shame,
when our healer had spoken so tenderly to us so many
times. We even, through unfaithfulness, turned our
beauty (no longer love’s beauty resting on us) into a
disgusting thing, a horror. How did we do this? How
are we such people? And love, to awaken us, in love’s
anger, exposes us to the shaming powers of bad
shepherds and pitiless images. We see with great grief
how untrustworthy these beings are as they pillage us
and put us to shame.

And this shamefulness comes out of our self-
satisfaction, our lack of love, our lack of growth along
the true path, including our lack of aid for the poor
and desperate. We alienated ourselves from the truth
about ourselves, that we are desperate people, and so
we alienated ourselves from love — and so are put to
shame before even the evil ones, with their merciless
or leering eyes.

And after all of our exposure, our great shame,
love will remember how he helped us when we were

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younger, how he did so not because we deserved to be
helped, but because of our desperate sheep’s need, and
will form a new bond with us that will last forever, in
which we remember our old ways with shame for a
time, and are quieted in our hearts forever, in which
we really understand that we do not deserve to be
forgiven, that we have escaped from evil leadings and
destruction by the skin of our teeth, we’re living on
borrowed time, and we have no boasting left, not in
our own leading, and so in a new simplicity stick close
to the good shepherd, and obey love’s voice.

My friends, I hope you take heed to this.

Sincerely,

Yours truly.

August 17th, a warm day and a lukewarm night
Dear friends,

You will sometimes have to remember what is
trustworthy when you are beguiled by the vividness
and obviousness of the present moment. Love provides
the consolation of closeness to the shepherd, but
endless consolation is not trustworthy. You will
sometimes seek the shepherd for the shepherd’s sake,
sometimes for the sake of the safety of the shepherd’s
side, sometimes for the consolation of the safety,
sometimes for the self-satisfaction of the consolation.
At some point along this path, love will dry up its
source of consolation, because love himself is
ultimately trustworthy. We learn as we keep living

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that our past sense of trustworthiness was itself
immature and not fully trustworthy. (For this reason,
it is important to keep living.) We begin in a
predicament in which nothing can be relied upon
formulaicly (but this is a blessing because we are thus
housed from birth in the house of beyond), yet it is a
predicament because we rightfully crave to trust fully,
in our full lived reality, to trust ourselves and a
sufficient number of our neighbors, find a trustworthy
past and final image.

We start off being the true masters of no form of
trustworthiness and trustworthiness-discernment, and
yet we would need mastery to validate any other
faculty of trustworthiness-discernment (and even to
unlock full trustworthiness in ourselves). So, we begin
from naivety, from a false sense of discernment and
knowledge, and yet by this blessing we confidently
attempt to live and even succeed in living life,
learning along the way what the taste of trustworthy
leadings is. We start from impossibility, and wildly
try, and accidentally expose ourselves to
trustworthiness, and then follow those trustworthy
things down their path, until we reach the limit of the
path, if it has a limit. We have a dome tent, with
three poles, given for our lives. The poles come up
each in an arc making two contacts with the ground,
curving the fabric of the tent. Perhaps you have set
up a tent like this, physically. We put up the tent not
one pole at a time, because no one pole can be set up
all the way by itself, but we awkwardly and naively
put one pole up halfway, then the other two at

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intervals, until finally, through an arbitrary and even
bizarre process, we suddenly find ourselves with a tent
in which we can at least spend the night, until
perhaps we have to get out for the next stopping-place
on the great journey, which is itself like the setting up
of a tent.

Because we set off anew so much, it is important to
put in our backpacks the important tools for setting
up our tent. These tools are teachings, memories, even
friendships, which we can rely on in the process of
doing things over and over, and also, although we may
not immediately know how to use them or be
supported by them in such circumstances, in the
exceptional and unprecedented disruptions of the
everyday flow of our long life’s-journey. It is important
to remember and hold to what is valuable, what has
helped us solve our problems in the past. These tools
and allies have proven themselves reliable in the fight
or the storm, and are to be honored by our
appreciation and in most cases, by our loyal
perpetuation of them with us into our future. The
backpack has only so much space for tools, so find the
truly worthy, and there are only so many chances we
get to form and maintain nourishing friendships, so do
not let go of connections with such healthy people
through mere apathy or distraction. (And there are
even, for some of us, people who will walk with us
wherever we go, those who are not just allies, but
companions, who share with us the contents of our
backpacks, and their backpacks; our tent, and their
tent; on the same part of the road at the same time,

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always under the same sky.)

We may find ourselves having to return to people
or to “spirit-tools” (words and sayings, for instance),
to love itself, through a process of deliberate return.

In this we can practice freedom, and yet will also
experience the bittersweet heartbreak of repentance,
the grief and the mourning and the new closeness of
having come from far away.

My friends, it will be so difficult for us to adjust to
life as it will be in the coming years. In any
circumstance hard, but with this madness of the
storm of the world as it rages in the present, this heat,
this system making a great surge — what will stop
this heat? What will bring restoration? Whatever that
correction is, it will be painful.

You and I were raised in peace and wealth. Our
version of poverty is actually wealth. We will know
poverty, when the world runs itself out, or is stopped
in its tracks.

You and I were raised to be small people with
small horizons. We were raised to be dismayed by
small stormclouds. We were raised to have a great
compulsion for small hungers.

We were not taught to love discipline, and we find the
endurance of pain to be unacceptable — we have
grown more and more pained for not accepting pain,
for shying away from it in hopes that it would all go
away, but there is always pain, the question is, is there
beauty?

We were taught futility and hedonism — you have

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no fame, so you have no voice, so settle back and
enjoy what is given to you. There is an intensity
required just to live life, which will be demanded more
and more as the times grow in turmoil and
deprivation. This intensity requires muscles, muscles
which we have not tended to develop.

We will be thrown into a situation which we
cannot comprehend — our brothers and sisters
outside the West may understand — but we will be
struck with no ideas. Who are we? We do not know,
but in the coming century, we will find out.

We can live for life or we can live for love. Those of
us who live for love will live rich lives in the years to
come, because there is an abundant richness of people
to love, in their desperation, a resounding field of
possibility. Those of us who cling to living for life will
be brought to account against that hungry
commitment, over and over, as life is torn away from
us. Our lives will become poorer, darker, bleaker,
unbearable, as we cling to what cannot last. We will
even see the world come to ruin, and feel a sorrow
which somehow does not lead us to love of what
remains, love of ourselves even, but instead a despair
and in the despair, a closed-heartedness and for some
of us, even brutality.

I have written this to encourage you rather than to
frighten you into paralysis. Please be strengthened as
you go to sleep tonight, as you ponder what I have
said.

Sincerely,

Yours truly

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0m0

August 18th, a milder kind of warm day, at home and
in the library.

My dear friends,

Our future is not going to be beautiful or good,
and I will explain in more detail later, but for now I
will simply say that we live in an evil system which
cannot even sustain itself — there are the twin evils of
lovelessness and mindless, life-of-its-own,
overconsumption.

And so it is a mercy if our world system can be
ended in a way that brings new life.

Like the beginning of new human life, this process
involves birth pains. And for a woman in a society
that has never seen new life being born, these pains
are frightening and bizarre. They present as symptoms
of a terrible disease. Certain doctors will offer drugs
that can end birth pains, that can end labor — which
prevents birth. The woman who does not know of new
life can easily fall into trusting these “compassionate
men” who turn out not to have any real knowledge of
what is going on with the woman. But at the end of
the labor, if there is (or even sometimes, often, if there
isn’t) a midwife present and attending, if this labor
can be trusted more than the doctors, an alien being
can emerge into the world, and become a familiar and
beloved son or daughter, quite naturally.

Our society is a woman undergoing birth pains.

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The contractions are coming sooner and sooner, but
we so far can see them as some meaningless
phenomenon. But someday we will have to take
notice, and listen either to doctors or mid wives. We
have to learn to discern what kind of voices are
trustworthy and which are not. This is what I have
been trying to encourage you to do.

As good shepherds, we are like midwives, helping
our society survive the birth with a minimum of
bleeding. We calm the fears of the woman because we
ourselves have given birth to new life, on our own
level. The more the woman can trust in the
healthiness of the entire process of birth, the better off
she will be and the less complicated and tragic the
inevitable emergence of her son or daughter.

The “doctors” will say that “powerful aliens” have
come to trick us. This is what happens when someone
outside society comes to speak with authority to
society. There is no category for such a person other
than “alien”, and the “doctors” who have sworn an
oath to preserve the woman’s life (as far as they
understand life), will by default clearly “understand”
that these forces that turn out to be birth-giving are
untrustworthy.

But we who are midwives must accept this alien in
our midst, for to us, he will not feel like, “vibe as” an
alien, though we have never laid eyes on him before.

By learning to trust love, we were all along learning to
trust him. And through us, and our trust, the woman
can come to trust this alien whose coming wakes up
her last and most intense contractions.

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We as midwives will still, as we are somehow part
of the woman herself, experience the pain of her
contractions, but we will do so with the joy set before
us of a new life. We will suffer but consider it joy,
consider it something worth living through, we want
to continue living in order to see this new world
emerge from the old world, and even for the two to
embrace, for the old world to really become a woman,
as she will somehow have stumbled into becoming a
mother.

This pregnancy was not gotten through any
literally sexual means. (After all, the “woman” is
simply the world, not a physical woman), but rather
by the spirit of love and the voice of love working to
create new life inside the woman, and the woman even
nourishing this new life without realizing what she’s
doing, until comes the time when the woman’s body
longs more and more to bring this new being out into
the light, so that the woman can see her son (or I
think perhaps it will really be her daughter) with her
own eyes, and love with her “consciousness” (her
official judgment and perception) what her body
longed to hold and adore. This longing had no clear
meaning for the “mind” of the woman (the thinking
elite?) and the woman consciously even ignored it at
times — but still, a great hunger — for what? We
mid wives know, having seen ourselves and our
neighbors give birth.

The longing to hold a child is also the longing to
“Get it over with”, to just “Get it over with.” There is
an underlying urgency, a voice that speaks, just, when

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it does, and announces that “now is the time.” When a
voice is not listened to as a voice, eventually,
whenever, it breaks in.

The urgency is a longing we can’t fulfill, like a heat
wave setting in for a month, where it really doesn’t
even get all that cool at night. Our longing washes
over us as we long for new life, and this is a sign of
health, that we have not taken those strange
anesthetics which comprise the “doctors’” “mercy”, but
which can actually threaten our life as expectant
mothers, can end a pregnancy, because as this is a
spiritual pregnancy, the longing itself is essentially a
part of our contractions, our process of getting that
new son or daughter out where we can finally see him
or her.

When the good shepherd walks with us, we will
only have to know enough to listen to his guidance,
and this is our main preparation for the birth of the
new world, in all of its insanity. Yet it is of some
benefit, as well, to have learned how to live through
insane times. If you have a choice, do not shut yourself
off to all of the insanities that come to you. Instead,
learn to live through insanity, and even practice
finding your peace (love’s gift) in the midst. It will
also help to learn how to endure poverty with an
underlying joy (in the midst of misery), instead of an
underlying misery (in the midst of misery). Practice
these three skills, of discernment and listening to
love’s voice; endurance and peace through insanity;
and endurance and joy through poverty; my dearly-
loved friends.

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19 August, a warm, quiet day

My beloved friends,

I am sitting hungrily, but fortunately awaiting
food. Yet in the coming years, there will likely come a
time (unless we can escape the gravity of earth and
mine the asteroids) when we will run out of an
important plant nutrient, phosphorus. We have to
mine it now, and these mines may well only have 50
years left to them — but we do not even have that
much guaranteed. We will live through times of
poverty, starvation, and war — we, or our
descendants. We will have to learn to live with less
food — less meat first, then as necessary less of
everything else. We must learn how to endure and
survive suffering, and as well we will learn, as lovers,
to not panic, because love speaks to us as we listen to
love and respond to love, and love assures of our
beautiful deaths, in love, and love’s beautiful gift of
life to us, the judgment and healing of us into the
final harmony.

We need to be healed and fully listen to love’s voice,
to overcome shame through completed obedience. We
need to be led out of sin into love.

And we will see desperation given a new flesh, a
new vividness, and obviousness, which is an
opportunity for love to speak vividly and obviously,
and we will speak love’s voice.

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Times will be difficult and there will be panic-fed lies.
We will need to be trustworthy, to untie the lies with
gentleness and patience, if possible, and with boldness
and forcefulness cut the lies, if in the moment we truly
have to.

The voice of the terror of death is as trustworthy
as the voice of immortal power — it is still the voice
putting foundness in your power in the heart’s highest
place. The terror-of-death voice speaks when that
foundness is threatened — but not yet truly lost; the
voice of immortal power — self-satisfaction — when
the question isn’t even raised, or answered in a
thousand-yard-stare affirmation. This voice of terror
will deceive many, leading them into desperate
lovelessness, and yet there is some way to speak to
desperate people, if their desperation does not close
their ears.

There may come a true lostness in this time, and
thus an openness toward love, even an accidental
discovery of love because of lostness, a lostness in love.

But we, as good shepherds, will be tasked more
with proclaiming a foundness in love, although in our
times of wealth we had needed to proclaim a lostness
in love. And we will have to bring love, in lostness and
foundness, to our love of those in terror, those
frightened sheep. We will even be lost with them, but
lost in love, not afraid even though we can no longer
tell north from south, or east from west. We will be
huddled in caves, singing the song of love, as we have
sung at various times through the ages, huddling with
those who must seek shelter from evil.

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You who understand what I say, consider how to
prepare for this impending possibility (and
phosphorus is not the only resource that is likely to
run out).

But if we can get minerals from space — If we can
explore space! Then we can continue the familiar life
of colonialism and over-consumption, of rampant,
mindless increase. And then, O lovers, we will have
the challenge of ' It needs to change' as we do today,
of further awakening relentless and yet trustworthy
compassion. You who understand me and have
understood me, you see the way to go.

And what of nuclear war? As we die from the fall¬
out, with no future, and nothing but time in contact
with negative reality, we will curse the source of life,
this “supposed” guarantor of our well-being (love
himself!), and curse the bad shepherds who got us
into our death. And so the lovers will have to practice
forgiveness, and teach it with gentle trustworthiness,
and even electricity. Let the understanding reader seek
the true path.

And what of the technological singularity? Be very
cautious with this phenomenon, which speaks as the
voice of immortality. Better to die than be the slave of
mindless power, do not betray love if you participate
in this. Let us speak of what is trustworthy. And love
will guide and preserve us. Let us become willing to
die for love, and trust in him, love, his desire for us
and regard for our well-being, ultimately his regard
for us together, his and our harmonious body. Let us
learn to trust trustworthiness himself, those of us who

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have understood, and have seen ahead thus far in the
path. (I myself have much to learn, far to grow, to the
point of trusting with my life, that my end will be in
love, in beauty, to the point of getting new life again.)

And this present reality is a time of great ugliness
and brutality in the lives of the desperate and the self-
satisfied. I call you, and you, call me, to a new
fellowship, which comes not to serve, but to raise up
servants from among itself, seeking out among the lost
sheep those who desire as their end goal to live for
love of others, rather than in fear for their own
present or future well-being. This is all we need to
motivate us to grow in love: our love, such as it is, of
those who suffer.

Let us not deceive ourselves. I thought I wanted a
wife for many years, but I did not; I thought 1 wanted
to be friends for a time, when really I did not; I
thought I was loving people when I could never trust
them enough to love them, until finally 1 loved them
enough to demand trust and trustworthiness, and out
of that honesty, I found that I had left them. For four
years I studied and got a college degree that I never,
really, wanted to use in the first place, although I very
straightforwardly fooled myself, despite those who
doubted me. We know the truth of love by our
actions, by the work that cuts into us, and by laying
our hearts down for love to transform us. Our hearts
must become pure, and so our minds must become
clean enough that we would not be put to shame, or
found out as untrustworthy, if our minds were out in
the open. Our hearts must be devoted to doing the

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work that love intended for us when we were made at
love’s design. We must be consumed by love,
harboring no hate within us for our brothers and
sisters — and all are our brothers and sisters. You
have not arrived, you have a long way to go, you will
inevitably get there, so you might as well start now.

Although I write in a poetic way, and in a book, I
mean this straightforwardly, and those who
understand will know what to do. If any of my readers
has something to say to me, any questions or feedback
at all, you may email me at banks@10v24.net or look
at my website, 10v24.net, for more information. As
much as I can love people I have never seen, I love
you, readers, and hope that I have really loved you.
Sincerely,

Yours truly,

James

Now S., this is my final word to you before I go.

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Perhaps, as I’ve said before, we will meet in a more
substantial world than this book. But for now, this is
all.

After reading this all, you may wonder, “Is this for
real?” If that’s how you feel, I can understand your
skepticism. I regret my “poker face” and inner
conflictedness, with which I greeted you (or failed to
greet you!) when I saw you last. It takes time to get
to really know me, so if you seek me out, just trust
me a little at first, and trust more only as I am
trustworthy. (And for that matter, / would need to
grow in trust of you, as I only know you a little bit.)

I realize that in particular there is a lot you
wouldn’t know about my origin or background. It
seemed not to be fitting for this book, but I will tell
you what I can if you ask.

I wrote earlier that I was open to any of the
possibilities in Chapter 1, but I will say that my first
preference would be a relationship such as was
envisioned in the end of Chapter 1, in which we are
simply good friends. If you are willing, let’s aim at
that and if we miss, so be it. It may seem odd that I
would go to such lengths to simply gain a friend
(rather than aim for romance), but for me, a good
friendship is valuable and even rare, and as I have
said, people like you don’t come around very often.

Now it is your right, responsibility, privilege, and
opportunity, to respond, or not, to what I’ve written.

Don’t be deceived. Judge by love. Seek love out to
your fullest. Prepare for the future. Get to work. Be
bound to the paths that make you free. Seek to be

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trustworthy, in the ways that all of us are called to
become trustworthy. And keep reaching out to
strangers, and while you are not yet perfected, be
yourself and more yourself, until you are.

2 September 2015

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